Periodic boundary conditions for long-time nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations of incompressible flows

This work presents a generalization of the Kraynik-Reinelt (KR) boundary conditions for nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. In the simulation of steady, homogeneous flows with periodic boundary conditions, the simulation box deforms with the flow, and it is possible for image particles to become arbitrarily close, causing a breakdown in the simulation. The KR boundary conditions avoid this problem for planar elongational flow and general planar mixed flow [T. A. Hunt, S. Bernardi, and B. D. Todd, J. Chem. Phys. 133, 154116 (2010)] through careful choice of the initial simulation box and by periodically remapping the simulation box in a way that conserves image locations. In this work, the ideas are extended to a large class of three-dimensional flows by using multiple remappings for the simulation box. The simulation box geometry is no longer time-periodic (which was shown to be impossible for uniaxial and biaxial stretching flows in the original work by Kraynik and Reinelt [Int. J. Multiphase Flow 18, 1045 (1992)]. The presented algorithm applies to all flows with nondefective flow matrices, and in particular, to uniaxial and biaxial flows.