Shear viscosity of molten sodium chloride

Abstract

The shear viscosity of molten sodium chloride is determined under a wide range of strain rates using nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) simulations in the canonical (N,V,T) ensemble. Questions have been recently raised on the use of kinetic temperature thermostats, based on the equipartition principle, in simulations of nonequilibrium fluids and using a configurational temperature thermostat has been suggested to be more realistic. To further ascertain the results obtained in this work, we study molten NaCl with both kinetic and configurational temperature thermostats. Since configurational thermostats have been so far restricted to simple fluids or alkanes, we first apply configurational expressions for the temperature to molten NaCl, test the values so obtained in equilibrium molecular dynamics simulation for various system sizes and state points and finally use them to thermostat molten NaCl under shear. NEMD results obtained for both thermostats show that except for the so-called normal stress coefficients, molten salt under shear exhibits mostly the same features as a simple fluid under shear, i.e., features in agreement with the mode-coupling theory. The choice of the thermostatting method is found to have little influence on the results for the range of shear rates investigated.