Poiseuille flow to measure the viscosity of particle model fluids.

The most important property of a fluid is its viscosity, it determines the flow properties. If one simulates a fluid using a particle model, calculating the viscosity accurately is difficult because it is a collective property. In this article we describe a new method that has a better signal to noise ratio than existing methods. It is based on using periodic boundary conditions to simulate counter-flowing Poiseuille flows without the use of explicit boundaries. The viscosity is then related to the mean flow velocity of the two flows. We apply the method to two quite different systems. First, a simple generic fluid model, dissipative particle dynamics, for which accurate values of the viscosity are needed to characterize the model fluid. Second, the more realistic Lennard-Jones fluid. In both cases the values we calculated are consistent with previous work but, for a given simulation time, they are more accurate than those obtained with other methods.