Numerical Treatment of Stokes Solvent Flow and Solute–Solvent Interfacial Dynamics for Nonpolar Molecules

We design and implement numerical methods for the incompressible Stokes solvent flow and solute–solvent interface motion for nonpolar molecules in aqueous solvent. The balance of viscous force, surface tension, and van der Waals type dispersive force leads to a traction boundary condition on the solute–solvent interface. To allow the change of solute volume, we design special numerical boundary conditions on the boundary of a computational domain through a consistency condition. We use a finite difference ghost fluid scheme to discretize the Stokes equation with such boundary conditions. The method is tested to have a second-order accuracy. We combine this ghost fluid method with the level-set method to simulate the motion of the solute–solvent interface that is governed by the solvent fluid velocity. Numerical examples show that our method can predict accurately the blow up time for a test example of curvature flow and reproduce the polymodal (e.g., dry and wet) states of hydration of some simple model molecular systems.