Unified slip boundary condition for fluid flows

Determining the correct matching boundary condition is fundamental to our understanding of several everyday problems. Despite over a century of scientific work, existing velocity boundary conditions are unable to consistently explain and capture the complete physics associated with certain common but complex problems, such as moving contact lines and corner flows. The widely used Maxwell and Navier slip boundary conditions make an implicit assumption that velocity varies only in the wall normal direction. This makes their boundary condition inapplicable in the vicinity of contact lines and corner points, where velocity gradient exists both in the wall normal and wall tangential directions. In this paper, by identifying this implicit assumption we are able to extend Maxwell's slip model. Here, we present a generalized velocity boundary condition that shows that slip velocity is a function of not only the shear rate but also the linear strain rate. In addition, we present a universal relation for slip length, which shows that, for a general flow, slip length is a function of the principal strain rate. The universal relation for slip length along with the generalized velocity boundary condition provides a unified slip boundary condition to model a wide range of steady Newtonian fluid flows. We validate the unified slip boundary for simple Newtonian liquids by using molecular dynamics simulations and studying both the moving contact line and corner flow problems.