A nonmolecular derivation of Maxwell's thermal-creep boundary condition in gases and liquids via application of the LeChatelier-Braun principle to Maxwell's thermal stress

According to the LeChatelier-Braun principle, when a closed quiescent system initially in an equilibrium or unstressed steady state is subjected to an externally imposed stress it responds in a manner tending to alleviate that stress. Use of this entropically based qualitative rule, in combination with the notion of Maxwell thermal stresses existing in nonisothermal gases and liquids, enables one to (i) derive Maxwell's thermal-creep boundary condition prevailing at the boundary between a solid and a fluid (either gas or liquid) and (ii) rationalize the phenomenon of thermophoresis in liquids, for which, in contrast with the case of gases, an elementary explanation is currently lacking. These two objectives are achieved by quantitatively interpreting the heretofore qualitative LeChatelier-Braun notion of stress in the present context as being the fluid's stress tensor, the latter including Maxwell's thermal stress. In effect, thermophoretic particle motion is interpreted as the manifestation of the fluid's attempt to expel the particle from its interior so as to alleviate the thermal stress that would otherwise ensue were the particle to remain at rest (thus obeying the traditional no slip rather than thermal-creep boundary condition) following its introduction into the previously stress-free quiescent fluid. With Kn the Knudsen number in the case of rarefied gases, Maxwell's thermal stress constitutes a noncontinuum phenomenon of O(Kn(2)), whereas his thermal-creep phenomenon constitutes a continuum phenomenon of O(Kn). That these two phenomena can, nevertheless, be proved to be synonymous (in the sense, so to speak, of being two sides of the same coin), as is done in the present paper, supports the ghost effect findings of Sone [Y. Sone, Flows induced by temperature fields in a rarefied gas and their ghost effect on the behavior of a gas in the continuum limit, Annu. Rev. Fluid Mech 32, 779 (2000)], which, philosophically, imply the artificiality of the distinction currently existing between continuum- and noncontinuum-level phenomena.