Quantitative analysis of surface tension of liquid nano-film with thickness: Two stage stability mechanism, molecular dynamics and thermodynamics approach

The effects of thickness on surface tension of aqueous nano-films under the same lateral size were studied by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The surface tension was found to decrease with decreasing thickness when film thickness is below 1.5 nm. Between 4 and 1.5 nm, the trend is for the surface tension to decrease but this is not as significant as between 1.5 and 1.2 nm. For the surface tension of salt nano-films, with low temperatures resulting in monotonous decreasing with thickness, while high temperature (e.g. 479 K) exhibited a first increase then decrease for surface tension with thickness. Filippini et al. (2014) suggested that surface tension is constant with the thickness as long as the sheet remains in one piece, also the decrease observed and as proposed by Werth et al. (2013) is not due to a confinement effect on Lennard-Jones systems. However, in this study for aqueous nano-films, a two stage mechanism was proposed to interpret this effect, for which the stability was classified according to thickness range and validated by disjoining pressure. The results are important in describing the role of surface tension in determining the behaviour of disjoining pressure.