A number of DPD studies report models where the interfacial tension for oil-water systems closer to experimental data. In these works, both oil and water are often represented as single beads and the repulsion amplitude describing the interaction between the two solvents is then set to a large value, e. g. A wat,oil ≈ 100 in order to reproduce the experimental interfacial tension. Using a larger value for A ij has the effect of sharpening up the transition in the liquid density at the interface. We can reproduce this effect in our model by increasing the repulsion amplitude between water and dodecane beads (both types) from A wat,dod = 45 (solid lines in Fig. ) to 100 (dashed lines in Fig. ). With this increased repulsion amplitude we find γ wat,dod = 54.5 ± 0.3 mN m -1 , which is adjusted to be close to experiment. Such large changes in the oil-water interaction parameters would render our model useless in its ability to reproduce partition coefficients and liquid phase densities for which the model was originally parameterised though. To explore this still a little further, we compare these results from the two DPD models with an MD simulation of a dodecane-water interface (dotted lines in Fig. ). The resultant MD value of the water-dodecane interfacial tension was γ wat,dod = 56 ± 3 mN m -1 . We observe (Fig. ) that in the MD simulation the interface width is even narrower than the artificially sharpened DPD model. Now we turn to the substrate surface energies, using simulations of either pure water or pure dodecane, confined between parallel walls as described in Sec. 2.4.1. Table and Fig. show how the surface energies for water and dodecane varies with the surface repulsion amplitude A s,α (where α is either dodecane or water). For both liquids, the value of γ s,α increases strongly as expected. In the case where the interaction between the surface and the liquids are set to zero, the recorded surface energies are large and negative (γ s,wat = -64.7 mN m -1 and γ s,dod = -77.1 mN m -1 ). Figs. and present the density profiles of the water and dodecane liquids at the surface with increasing A s,α . For both liquids significant ordering results with dodecane being more strongly affected than water. Ordering in the case of water persists for ≈ 2 DPD distance units and for dodecane this is increased to ≈ 3 units. Surface induced ordering is minimized for both liquids at A s,α ≈ 20.