Nanoscale simulations of directional locking

When particles suspended in a fluid are driven through a regular lattice of cylindrical obstacles, the particle motion is usually not simply in the direction of the force, and in the high Peclet number limit particle trajectories tend to lock along certain lattice directions. By means of molecular dynamics simulations we show that this effect persists in the presence of molecular diffusion for nanoparticle flows, provided the Peclet number is not too small. We examine the effects of varying particle and obstacle size, the method of forcing, solid roughness, and particle concentration. While we observe trajectory locking in all cases, the degree of locking varies with particle size and these flows may have application as a separation technique.