We performed molecular dynamics analysis of the momentum transfer at the solid-liquid interface for a water-methanol liquid mixture between parallel non-polar solid walls in order to understand the strong decrease of the friction coefficient (FC) induced by the methanol adsorption at the surface observed in our previous work [S. Nakaoka et al., Phys. Rev. E 92, 022402 (2015)]. In particular, we extracted the individual contributions of water and methanol molecules to the total FC and found that the molecular FC for methanol was larger than that for water. We further showed that the reduction of the total solid-liquid FC upon the increase of the methanol molar fraction in the first adsorption layer occurred as a result of a decrease in the molecular number density as well as a decrease in the molecular FCs of both molecules. Analysis of the molecular orientation revealed that the decrease of the molecular FC of methanol resulted from changes of the contact feature onto the solid surface. Specifically, methanol molecules near the solid surface had their C-O bond parallel to the surface with both CH and O sites contacting the solid at low methanol molar fraction, while they had their C-O bond outward from the surface with only the CH site contacting the solid at higher methanol molar fraction. The mechanisms discussed in this work could be used to search for alternative water additives to further reduce the solid-liquid friction.

The effect of methanol mixing on a nanoscale water flow was examined by using nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations of a Couette-type flow between nonpolarized smooth solid surfaces. Water and methanol molecules were uniformly mixed in the bulk, whereas at the solid-liquid interface methanol molecules showed a tendency to be adsorbed on the solid surface. Similar to a macroscale Couette flow, the shear stress exerted on the solid surface was equal to the shear stress in the liquid, showing that the mechanical balance holds in nanoscale. In addition, the shear stress in the liquid bulk was equal to the viscous stress which is a product of viscosity and velocity gradient. When more methanol molecules were adsorbed on the solid surface, the friction coefficient (FC) between solid and liquid was largely reduced with a small amount of methanol and that led to a remarkable decrease of the shear stress. The cause of the FC reduction was investigated in terms of the local rotational diffusion coefficient (RDC) near the solid surface, and it was shown that different from an existing model, the FC and local RDC were not simply inversely proportional to each other in the mixture system because the solid-liquid interfacial state was more complex.

The relation between the rotational diffusion (RD) coefficient of water molecules and viscosity, that theoretically are inversely proportional to each other, was examined by using molecular dynamics simulations. In a homogeneous bulk liquid system, both the viscosity calculated from the virial theorem and the experimental one correlated well with the inverse of water RD coefficient at various temperatures. In a heterogeneous system of water between solid walls with different solid-liquid interaction strength, the viscosity distribution was similar to the distribution of the RD coefficient inverse multiplied by density, and this suggests the possibility of extracting nanometer-scale viscosity distribution by RD.

In this study, we carried molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of water and various alcohol liquids on a flat SiO2 surface terminated by hydroxyl groups in order to examine the microscopic structures of these liquids near the solid surface and diffusion property for the fundamental understanding of the wet process during the semiconductor fabrication. As an equilibrium state, water as well as methanol, ethanol and isopropyl alcohol (IPA) molecules formed a multiple layered structure on the solid surface; however, the microscopic structures were remarkably different between water and IPA liquids because the IPA molecules in the first adsorption layer strongly adsorbed on the solid surface through the hydrogen bond with the surface hydroxyl groups with directing hydrophobic CH3 groups toward the second layer. Non-equilibrium MD simulations of the dilution of water/IPA adsorption layer by IPA/water solvent revealed that the strongly adsorbed IPA layer can easily be replaced by water molecules.

Using equilibrium molecular dynamics (EMD), we analyzed the friction between water-methanol liquid mixtures and a non-polar solid wall. Specifically, we calculated the friction coefficient (FC) from the autocorrelation of the shear force exerted on a liquid from a solid wall using two Green-Kubo (GK) equations proposed by Bocquet and Barrat (BB) [Physical Review E, Vol. 49, (1994), 3079], and Huang and Szulfarska (HS) [Physical Review E, Vol. 89 (2014), 032119], and compared these FC values with those obtained in our previous non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) work. Both GK equations reproduced the FC dependence on the methanol concentration in the first adsorption layer X MeOH a observed with NEMD, but the BB method gave a better estimate of the NEMD results with a difference of 20 % at largest. The independent molecular FCs of water and methanol, which were only extractable with the HS method from EMD simulations, corresponded qualitatively well with the NEMD results regarding the dependency on X MeOH a . Though certain discrepancies were observed between the EMD and NEMD results, the EMD had a considerable advantage regarding the computational time required to calculate the FC with a comparable error: the EMD computational time was about 20 times shorter than the NEMD time in the present system.