Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Self-Diffusion Coefficient and Its Relation with Temperature Using Simple Lennard-Jones Potential

The diffusion coefficient is indispensable to chemical engineering design and research. In practical engineering and research, there is still a great lack of available data. Therefore, methods need to be developed to solve this problem. In this paper, a molecular dynamics simulation method is used to predict the self-diffusion coefficient for a simple fluid by using the Green-Kubo relation (VACF) and the Einstein relation (MSD). The simulation results are in good agreement with experimental findings except for an error of about 10%. The algorithm average of the two methods (AV) reduces the error to 7%. The relationship of the diffusion coefficient with temperature has also been simulated. According to the simulation data, whose correlation is all above 0.99, the diffusion coefficient agrees well with temperature following the Arrenhius relationship. Activation energy for self-diffusion has been calculated and the result were 1258(VACF), 1272(MSD), and 1265(AV) J/mol separately. (C) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.