Supplementary material from "A nanoscale perspective on the effects of transverse microprestress on drying creep of nanoporous solids"

One explanation for its origins, developed using micromechanical models, is the progressive relaxation of internally developed microprestress. However, these models have not explicitly considered the effects of this microprestress on nanoscale energy barriers that govern the relative motion and displacement between nanopore walls during deformation.

Here, extending previous studies not accounting for this microprestress, we evaluate the nanoscale effects of transverse microprestresses on the drying creep behaviour of a nanoscale slit pore using coarse-grained molecular dynamics. We find that the underlying energy barrier depends exponentially on the transverse microprestress, which is attributed to the changes in the effective viscosity and degree nanoconfinement of molecules in the water interlayer.