Effects of Interfacial Interactions Between Fluid and Solid Wall on Microscale Flows

This work discusses the interfacial effects on flow and heat transfer at micro/nano scale. Different from bulk cases where interfaces can be simply treated as a boundary, the interfacial effects are not limited to the interface at microscale but extend into a significant, even the whole domain of the flow and heat transfer field when the characteristic size of the domain is close to the mean free path (MFP) of fluid particles. Most of microscale flow phenomena result from interfacial interactions. Any changes in the interactions between the fluid and solid wall particles could affect the flow and heat transfer characteristics, such as flow and temperature profiles, friction coefficient. The interactions depend on many parameters, such as the force between fluid and solid wall particles, microstructure of interfaces. The flow and heat transfer features does not only depend on the fluid itself, but also on the interaction with the solid wall because the interface impact can go deep inside the flow. Same fluid, same channel shape but different wall materials could have different flow characters.