Electrolyte exclusion from charged adsorbent: replica Ornstein-Zernike theory and simulations

Fluids in porous media. IV. Quench effect on chemical potential

It appears to be a common sense to measure the crowdedness of a fluid system by the densities of the species constituting it. In the present work, we show that this ceases to be valid for confined fluids under some conditions. A quite thorough investigation is made for a hard sphere (HS) fluid adsorbed in a hard sphere matrix (a quench-annealed system) and its corresponding equilibrium binary mixture. When fluid particles are larger than matrix particles, the quench-annealed system can appear much more crowded than its corresponding equilibrium binary mixture, i.e., having a much higher fluid chemical potential, even when the density of each species is strictly the same in both systems, respectively. We believe that the insight gained from this study should be useful for the design of functionalized porous materials.

A computational study of electrolyte adsorption in a simple model for intercalated clays

A pillared interlayered clay is represented by a two-dimensional quenched charged disordered medium, in which the pillar configuration is produced by the quench of a two-dimensional electrolyte and the subsequent removal of the anions (that act as a template). The cation charge is counterbalanced by a neutralizing background that is an ideal representation of the layer's negative charge in the experimental system. In this paper we investigate the adsorption of electrolyte particles in this charged disordered medium resorting both to the use of the replica Ornstein-Zernike equation in the hypernetted chain approximation and grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations. The theoretical approach qualitatively reproduces the simulated behavior of the adsorbed fluids. Theoretical estimates of the material porosities obtained for various types of pillar distributions are in good agreement with the simulation. We investigate the influence of the matrix on correlation functions and adsorption isotherms.