Wetting, flow & pH

Close-up of the triple contact line on a molecular scale
Molecular and continous description of the flow in a confined droplet under shear conditions
Close-up of a contact line moving over a simple corrugated substrate
A droplet of water surrounded by butanol in nanoconfinement.

Description of ongoing projects

The wetting and flow project studies molecular processes in dynamic wetting, including how they affect larger scales and interface with continuum models. Although wetting is a phenomenon that can be observed by eye at the macroscale, processes at the molecular scale can play an important role, especially at the three-phase contact line, where solid, liquid and gas meet. Here displacements of small groups of molecules determine how fast the contact line, and thereby the wetting advances. Molecular dynamics is a powerful tool to study these processes. Information obtained at the molecular scale can then transferred to model at larger scale in a multi-scale modeling framework. Current work projects concern fundamentals of contact line motion of water on hydrophilic substrates, electrowetting and wetting on rough surfaces.

The pH project focuses on implementing a constant-pH molecular dynamics (cpHMD) algorithm in the GROMACS molecular dynamics package. This is an ongoing collaboration between the Groenhof group at the university of Jyväskylä and the Hess group at KTH in Stockholm. Specifically, we have been developing a tool that allows for simple generation of input parameters for cpHMD simulations, as well as applying our novel cpHMD implementation to study proton-dependent conformational states of the ion channel GLIC (in collaboration with the Ligand-Gated Ion Channels group).

Current contributors

Alumni

  • Petter Johansson

Recent publications

Datasets

In an effort to make our results FAIR (findabile, accessibile, interoperabile and reusable), we publish the output of molecular simulations on Zenodo: