Fragmentation of suddenly heated liquids

Abstract

The rapid fragmentation of two-dimensional high-pressure disks of Lennard-Jones fluid was studied using molecular dynamics. The free expansion of 169-, 721-, 2611-, and 14 491-particle systems was studied for several sound-traversal times. The breakup into fragments (or clusters) can be roughly described by Grady’s model, which balances the surface energy with the comoving (dilational) kinetic energy of the fragments. The model predicts that the number of fragments varies as the cube root of the system population and the 2D/3 power of the initial pressure where D (2 or 3) is the dimensionality of the system. The molecular-dynamics results confirm these predictions within about ±0.1 and thereby rule out three other fragmentation models. The relatively high monomer temperatures and relatively uniform fragment temperatures found here correspond to temperatures found in recent three-dimensional Lennard-Jones simulations by Vicentini, Jacucci, and Pandharipande.