The fastest motions are bond and angle vibrations and librational motions, small fluctuations of dihedral angles around a bond within the same molecular conformation. These types of motions occur on a time scale up to a few picoseconds. This is also the time scale for the diffusion and orientational correlation of water and other small molecules. Trans-gauche isomerizations of the dihedrals in the lipid tails are slower and occur on a time scale of tens of picoseconds. Trans-gauche isomerizations become slower closer towards the headgroup of a lipid, up to a few hundred picoseconds. The dynamics of some of the dihedrals in the headgroups is slower because of the strong interactions within and between headgroups.
If one turn to whole lipids the time scales become even longer. In a few nanoseconds, phospholipids might rotate around their long axis. For lateral diffusion, or two lipids switching place within one bilayer leaflet, tens of nanoseconds are needed. Even slower motions such as the cooperative motion in phase transitions, the insertion of large molecules like proteins, or the rare event of a lipid flipping over to the opposite membrane leaflet are well out of reach of MD simulations. The same would be true for the slow process of permeation of small molecules through bilayers, but sometimes there are ways to get around such limitations.
There are at least two conclusions. The first is that straightforward MD is an excellent method to study the dynamics of tails and individual lipids. This is an important application because MD can give detailed atomic pictures that can be used for the interpretation of e.g. NMR studies on relaxation and diffraction studies on the rather disordered lipid membranes. It is also possible to study the behavior of solvent molecules in and near bilayers, as well as the differences in behaviour of different types of lipids in terms of structure and solvent dynamics.
The second conclusion is that any simulation of a lipid bilayer at the current state of the art will stay relatively close to the initial configuration, since the rotational and translational motion of lipids is too slow to sample accurately in a few nanoseconds. This is an important consideration in the simulation of the interactions of phospholipids with cholesterol or the interaction between proteins and lipids, to name but two applications.
In practise, the size of a model bilayer in a simulation is currently limited to ~100-200 lipid molecules; 50-100 lipids is the most popular size. Usually, periodic boundary conditions are used to avoid strong artefacts from the presence of boundary planes, so that effectively a stack of bilayers with infinite dimensions is simulated. In the literature the length of simulations is limited to a few nanoseconds; most simulations are less than a nanosecond. Although many interesting phenomena occur on the nanosecond time scale, processes like phase transitions, phase separation in lipid mixtures, membrane fusion, protein folding or protein insertion into membranes are well out of reach of straightforward molecular dynamics.