Structure and Dynamics of Fluids in Microporous and Mesoporous Earth and Engineered Materials

Effects of Confinement and Pressure on the Vibrational Behavior of Nano-Confined Propane

Fluids confined in nanopores exhibit significant deviations in their structure and dynamics from the bulk behavior. Although phase, structural, and diffusive behaviors of confined fluids have been investigated and reported extensively, confinement effects on the vibrational properties are less understood. We study the vibrational behavior of propane confined in 1.5 nm nanopores of MCM-41-S using inelastic neutron scattering (INS) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Vibrational spectra have been obtained from INS data as functions of temperature and pressure. At ambient pressure, a strong quasielastic signal observed in the INS spectrum at 80 K suggests that confined propane remains liquid below the bulk phase melting point of 85 K. The quasielastic signal is heavily suppressed when either the pressure is increased to 1 kbar or the temperature is lowered to 30 K, indicating solidification of pore-confined propane. Confinement in MCM-41-S pores results in a glass-like state of propane that exhibits a relatively featureless low-energy vibrational spectrum compared to that of the bulk crystalline propane. Increasing the pressure to 3 kbar results in hardening of the intermolecular and methyl torsional modes. The INS data are used for estimating the isochoric specific heat of confined propane, which is compared with the specific heat of bulk propane reported in literature. Data from MD simulations are used to calculate the vibrational power spectra that agree qualitatively with the experimental data. Simulation data also suggest a reduction of the structural ordering (positional, orientational, and intramolecular) of propane under confinement.

Aqueous NaCl and CsCl solutions confined in crystalline slit-shaped silica nanopores of varying degree of protonation

All-atom molecular dynamics simulations were conducted to study the dynamics of aqueous electrolyte solutions confined in slit-shaped silica nanopores of various degrees of protonation. Five degrees of protonation were prepared by randomly removing surface hydrogen atoms from fully protonated crystalline silica surfaces. Aqueous electrolyte solutions containing NaCl or CsCl salt were simulated at ambient conditions. In all cases, the ionic concentration was 1 M. The results were quantified in terms of atomic density distributions within the pores, and the self-diffusion coefficient along the direction parallel to the pore surface. We found evidence for ion-specific properties that depend on ion-surface, water-ion, and only in some cases ion-ion correlations. The degree of protonation strongly affects the structure, distribution, and the dynamic behavior of confined water and electrolytes. Cl(-) ions adsorb on the surface at large degrees of protonation, and their behavior does not depend significantly on the cation type (either Na(+) or Cs(+) ions are present in the systems considered). The cations show significant ion-specific behavior. Na(+) ions occupy different positions within the pore as the degree of protonation changes, while Cs(+) ions mainly remain near the pore center at all conditions considered. For a given degree of protonation, the planar self-diffusion coefficient of Cs(+) is always greater than that of Na(+) ions. The results are useful for better understanding transport under confinement, including brine behavior in the subsurface, with important applications such as environmental remediation.

Finite-size scaling study of the vapor-liquid critical properties of confined fluids: Crossover from three dimensions to two dimensions

We perform histogram-reweighting grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations of the Lennard-Jones fluid confined between two parallel hard walls and determine the vapor-liquid critical and coexistence properties in the range of sigma<or=H<or=6sigma and 10sigma<or=L(x),L(y)<or=28sigma, where H is the wall separation, L(x)=L(y) is the system size and sigma is the characteristic length. By matching the probability distribution of the ordering operator, P(M), to the three-dimensional (3D) and two-dimensional (2D) Ising universality classes according to the mixed-field finite-size scaling approach, we establish a "phase diagram" in the (H,L) plane, showing the boundary between four types of behavior: 3D, quasi-3D, quasi-2D, and 2D. In order to facilitate 2D critical point calculation, we present a four-parameter analytical expression for the 2D Ising universal distribution. We show that the infinite-system-size critical points obtained by extrapolation from the apparent 3D and 2D critical points have only minor differences with each other. In agreement with recent reports in the literature [Jana et al., J. Chem. Phys. 130, 214707 (2009)], we find departure from linearity in the relationship between critical temperature and inverse wall separation, as well as nonmonotonic dependence of the critical density and the liquid density at coexistence upon wall separation. Additional studies of the ST2 model of water show similar behavior, which suggests that these are quite general properties of confined fluids.

Ion-specific effects under confinement: the role of interfacial water

All-atom molecular dynamics simulations were employed for the study of the structure and dynamics of aqueous electrolyte solutions within slit-shaped silica nanopores with a width of 10.67 A at ambient temperature. All simulations were conducted for 250 ns to capture the dynamics of ion adsorption and to obtain the equilibrium distribution of multiple ionic species (Na+, Cs+, and Cl(-)) within the pores. The results clearly support the existence of ion-specific effects under confinement, which can be explained by the properties of interfacial water. Cl(-) strongly adsorbs onto the silica surface. Although neither Na+ nor Cs+ is in contact with the solid surface, they show ion-specific behavior. The differences between the density distributions of cations within the pore are primarily due to size effects through their interaction with confined water molecules. The majority of Na+ ions appear within one water layer in close proximity to the silica surface, whereas Cs+ is excluded from well-defined water layers. As a consequence of this preferential distribution, we observe enhanced in-plane mobility for Cs+ ions, found near the center of the pore, compared to that for Na+ ions, closer to the solid substrate. These observations illustrate the key role of interfacial water in determining ion-specific effects under confinement and have practical importance in several fields, from geology to biology.