Local shear viscosity of strongly inhomogeneous dense fluids: from the hard-sphere to the Lennard-Jones fluids

Abstract

This work aims at providing a tractable approach to model the local shear viscosity of strongly inhomogeneous dense fluids composed of spherical molecules, in which the density variations occur on molecular distance. The proposed scheme, which relies on the local density average model, has been applied to the quasi-hard-sphere, the Week–Chandler–Andersen and the Lennard-Jones fluids. A weight function has been developed to deal with the hard-sphere fluid given the specificities of momentum exchange. To extend the approach to the smoothly repulsive potential, we have taken into account that the non-local contributions to the viscosity due to the interactions of particles separated by a given distance are temperature dependent. Then, using a simple perturbation scheme, the approach is extended to the Lennard-Jones fluids. It is shown that the viscosity profiles of inhomogeneous dense fluids deduced from this approach are consistent with those directly computed by non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations.