Evaporation self-assembly

This is work by Shengfeng Cheng and Gary Grest at Sandia, to model self-assembly of nanoparticles at a liquid-vapor interface, induced by evaporation of the surrounding solvent. The quality of the remaining nanoparticle crystal structure is a result of the competition between evaporation rate and nanoparticle diffusion time.

The first figure shows snapshots of the simulation from different views. The second is a Voronoi tessellation of the top layer of the nanoparticle substrate. The coloring in both figures is based on a hexagonal order parameter for the local neighborhood of each particle. The third figure is an animation of the evaporation and ordering process.