Hydrodynamic lift of a moving nano-rod at a wall

Physics Department, Technical University Munich - 85748 Garching, Germany

Received: 30 January 2007
Accepted: 12 July 2007

Abstract

The hydrodynamic lift of a nano-rod that is pulled parallel to a wall is studied using hydrodynamic simulations and scaling arguments at finite temperature in the zero-Reynolds number limit. The no-slip wall gives rise to a hydrodynamic torque and partial rod orientation, which in turn induces a long-ranged hydrodynamic repulsion away from the wall. At high temperatures, the lift force depends quadratically on the pulling force and decays inversely with the square of the separation from the surface.