---

Thermal creep is often associated with the flowing of a rarefied gas via the effect of temperature difference in solid boundaries. Recently the feasibility of such flow in dense fluids becomes a challenge. This paper deals with simulating the thermal creep flow in liquids confined in nanotubes. The investigations are carried on by molecular dynamics simulation method. The goal of this work is providing a clean picture of the thermal creep phenomenon mechanism in liquids. Simulation results show the existence of such flow in liquids in nanotubes. The thermal creep effect is stronger in nanotubes with narrower cross sections. Molecular data provided by the simulations shows there is a fluid layering phenomenon near the solid wall. The fluid layering together with the wall temperature gradient develops a pressure gradient near the wall. This pressure gradient acts as a planar force and is assumed to be responsible for the thermal creep effect. This force causes the fluid to flow toward the hot side of the tube. The mechanism of thermal creep phenomena is justified by the use of molecular principles and molecular data which are obtained from the molecular dynamics simulations.

---

With the development of micro-mechanical systems, human became interested in concentrating on the small-scale impact on the flow and heat transfer in micro-channels. A micro-channel is required for a gas sensor to guide the gas flow. Reducing the size of channel has lead the scientist to concentrate on micro-sensor. Metal oxide gas micro-sensors are used to detect gases such as O3, SO2, CO2, NO, NH3, CH4 and etc. Metal oxide gas micro-sensors are small in size, low cost in fabrication and consume little power. The purpose of the current study is to numerically investigate the micro-channel wall thickness and diameter on gas inlet temperature under the influence of thermal creeping. The governing nonlinear differential equations, mass, momentum, energy, and species, are coupled and solved by a commercial code. The channel is assumed to be two dimensional. Since the Knudsen number is between 0.01 and 0.1, the slip boundary condition, Maxwell equation, is utilized. The result shows that as wall thickness increases the gas inlet temperature increases and temperature difference between gas inlet and outlet decreases. On the other hand as channel diameter decreases the gas inlet temperature increases.