  Area per lipid (APL) is an important property of biological and artificial
membranes. Newly constructed bilayers are characterized by their APL and newly
elaborated force fields must reproduce APL. Computer simulations of APL are
very expensive due to slow conformational dynamics. The simulated dynamics
increases exponentially with respect to temperature. APL dependence on
temperature is linear over an entire temperature range. I provide numerical
evidence that thermal expansion coefficient of a lipid bilayer can be computed
at elevated temperatures and extrapolated to the temperature of interest. Thus,
sampling times to predict accurate APL are reduced by a factor of ~10.
