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Title: Effect of surface roughness and size of beam on squeeze-film damping—Molecular dynamics simulation study

Journal Article · · Journal of Applied Physics
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4936579· OSTI ID:22492973
;  [1]
  1. School of Materials Engineering and Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907 (United States)

We use large-scale molecular dynamics (MD) to characterize fluid damping between a substrate and an approaching beam. We focus on the near contact regime where squeeze film (where fluid gap is comparable to the mean free path of the gas molecules) and many-body effects in the fluid become dominant. The MD simulations provide explicit description of many-body and non-equilibrium processes in the fluid as well as the surface topography. We study how surface roughness and beam width increases the damping coefficient due to their effect on fluid mobility. We find that the explicit simulations are in good agreement with prior direct simulation Monte Carlo results except at near-contact conditions where many-body effects in the compressed fluid lead the increased damping and weaker dependence on beam width. We also show that velocity distributions near the beam edges and for short gaps deviate from the Boltzmann distribution indicating a degree of local non-equilibrium. These results will be useful to parameterize compact models used for microsystem device-level simulations and provide insight into mesoscale simulations of near-contact damping.

OSTI ID:
22492973
Journal Information:
Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 118, Issue 20; Other Information: (c) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0021-8979
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English