Investigation of cold-to-hot transfer and thermal separation zone through nano step geometries

Nanosteps form once nanochannels of various diameters connect to each other. The focus of this paper is to investigate the heat transfer and hydro/thermal field behavior in nanostep geometries using direct simulation Monte Carlo. The effects of the hydrodynamics separation on the pressure field and heat lines are reported, i.e., we show that the length of the hydrodynamics separation zone is different from the positive pressure gradient and thermal separation zones. Interestingly, cold to hot transfer is observed when the wall temperatures and inlet temperature are close to each other. We show that cold to hot heat transfer appears due to the interplay between the higher order term of the heat flux formula, which is a function of the second derivate of the velocity, with the Fourier term; the cold to hot transfer effect is omitted as the wall temperature or Knudsen number increases. In addition, the impact of different parameters, such as pressure ratio, Knudsen number, and wall temperature adjacent to the separation zone, are investigated. The dependence of the mass flow rate and the length of the separation zone on the wall temperature and the channel pressure ratio is considered. We show that Knudsen minimum is not observed in the step geometry for both isothermal and non-isothermal wall conditions.