Density-dependent finite system-size effects in equilibrium molecular dynamics estimation of shear viscosity: Hydrodynamic and configurational study

KS Kim and C Kim and GE Karniadakis and EK Lee and JJ Kozak, JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL PHYSICS, 151, 104101 (2019).

DOI: 10.1063/1.5113751

We study the intrinsic nature of the finite system-size effect in estimating shear viscosity of dilute and dense fluids within the framework of the Green-Kubo approach. From extensive molecular dynamics simulations, we observe that the size effect on shear viscosity is characterized by an oscillatory behavior with respect to system size L at high density and by a scaling behavior with an L-1 correction term at low density. Analysis of the potential contribution in the shear-stress autocorrelation function reveals that the former is configurational and is attributed to the inaccurate description of the long-range spatial correlations in finite systems. Observation of the long-time inverse- power decay in the kinetic contribution confirms its hydrodynamic nature. The L-1 correction term of shear viscosity is explained by the sensitive change in the long-time tail obtained from a finite system.

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