Anisotropy in Growth Kinetics of Tetrahydrofuran Clathrate Hydrate: A Molecular Dynamics Study

Molecular Insights into the Effect of Nitrogen Bubbles on the Formation of Tetrahydrofuran Hydrates

In this work, a molecular dynamics simulation was conducted to study the microscopic mechanism of how nitrogen bubbles affect the formation of THF hydrates at the molecular level. The results obtained reveal that the nitrogen bubble can promote the formation of THF hydrates. In the system with a nitrogen bubble, more THF-filled cages were generated, and the crystal structure was more orderly. The promotion of nitrogen bubbles on hydrate crystallization comes from the dissolution of nitrogen molecules. Some of dissolved nitrogen molecules can be enclosed in small hydrate cages near the nitrogen bubble, which can serve as stable sites for hydrate crystal growth, resulting in the fact that THF-filled cages connected with N₂-filled cages are much more stable and have a long lifetime. The results in this work can help to understand the promotion effect of micro- and nano-air bubbles on the crystallization of THF hydrates.

Growth Rate and Morphology Study of Tetrahydrofuran Hydrate Single Crystals and the Effect of Salt

For an advanced gas hydrate management strategy in flow assurance as well as the application of a gas hydrate technology (e.g., desalination), it is important to understand the kinetics and...

Melt crystallization mechanism analyzed with dimensional reduction of high-dimensional data representing distribution function geometries

Melt crystallization is essential to many industrial processes, including semiconductor, ice, and food manufacturing. Nevertheless, our understanding of the melt crystallization mechanism remains poor. This is because the molecular-scale structures of melts are difficult to clarify experimentally. Computer simulations, such as molecular dynamics (MD), are often used to investigate melt structures. However, the time evolution of the structural order in a melt during crystallization must be analyzed properly. In this study, dimensional reduction (DR), which is an unsupervised machine learning technique, is used to evaluate the time evolution of structural order. The DR is performed for high-dimensional data representing an atom–atom pair distribution function and the distribution function of the angle formed by three nearest neighboring atoms at each period during crystallization, which are obtained by an MD simulation of a supercooled Lennard–Jones melt. The results indicate that crystallization occurs via the following activation processes: nucleation of a crystal with a distorted structure and reconstruction of the crystal to a more stable structure. The time evolution of the local structures during crystallization is also evaluated with this method. The present method can be applied to studies of the mechanism of crystallization from a disordered system for real materials, even for complicated multicomponent materials.

Factors Promoting the Formation of Clathrate-Like Ordering of Water in Biomolecular Structure at Ambient Temperature and Pressure

Clathrate hydrate forms when a hydrophobic molecule is entrapped inside a water cage or cavity. Although biomolecular structures also have hydrophobic patches, clathrate-like water is found in only a limited number of biomolecules. Also, while clathrate hydrates form at low temperature and moderately higher pressure, clathrate-like water is observed in biomolecular structure at ambient temperature and pressure. These indicate presence of other factors along with hydrophobic environment behind the formation of clathrate-like water in biomolecules. In the current study, we presented a systematic approach to explore the factors behind the formation of clathrate-like water in biomolecules by means of molecular dynamics simulation of a model protein, maxi, which is a naturally occurring nanopore and has clathrate-like water inside the pore. Removal of either confinement or hydrophobic environment results in the disappearance of clathrate-like water ordering, indicating a coupled role of these two factors. Apart from these two factors, clathrate-like water ordering also requires anchoring groups that can stabilize the clathrate-like water through hydrogen bonding. Our results uncover crucial factors for the stabilization of clathrate-like ordering in biomolecular structure which can be used for the development of new biomolecular structure promoting clathrate formation.

Adsorption of Kinetic Hydrate Inhibitors on Growing Surfaces: A Molecular Dynamics Study

We investigate the mechanism of a typical kinetic hydrate inhibitor (KHI), polyvinylcaprolactam (PVCap), which has been applied to prevent hydrate plugs from forming in gas pipe lines, using molecular dynamics simulations of crystal growth of ethylene oxide hydrate. Water-soluble ethylene oxide is chosen as a guest species to avoid problems associated with the presence of the gas phase in the simulation cell such as slow crystal growth. A PVCap dodecamer adsorbs irreversibly on the hydrate surface which grows at supercooling of 3 K when the hydrophobic part of two pendent groups are trapped in open cages at the surface. The amide hydrogen bonds make no contribution to the adsorption. PVCap can adsorb on various crystallographic planes of sI hydrate. This is in contrast to antifreeze proteins, each of which prefers a specific plane of ice. The trapped PVCap gives rise to necessarily the concave surface of the hydrate. The crystal growth rate decreases with increasing surface curvature, indicating that the inhibition by PVCap is explained by the Gibbs-Thomson effect.

Anisotropy in geometrically rough structure of ice prismatic plane interface during growth: Development of a modified six-site model of H2O and a molecular dynamics simulation

This paper presents a modified version of the six-site model of H₂O [H. Nada and J. P. J. M. van der Eerden, J. Chem. Phys. 118, 7401 (2003)]. Although the original six-site model was optimized by assuming the cut-off of the Coulomb interaction at an intermolecular distance of 10 Å, the modified model is optimized by using the Ewald method for estimating the Coulomb interaction. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of an ice-water interface suggest that the melting point of ice at 1 atm in the modified model is approximately 274.5 K, in good agreement with the real melting point of 273.15 K. MD simulations of bulk ice and water suggest that the modified model reproduces not only the structures and density curves of ice and water, but also the diffusion coefficient of water molecules in water near the melting point at 1 atm. Using the modified model, a large-scale MD simulation of the growth at an ice-water interface of the prismatic plane is performed to elucidate the anisotropy in the interface structure during growth. Simulation results indicate that the geometrical roughness of the ice growth front at the interface is greater in the c-axis direction than in the direction normal to the c-axis when it is analyzed along the axes parallel to the prismatic plane. In addition, during the growth at the interface, the transient appearance of specific crystallographic planes, such as a {202¯1} pyramidal plane, occurs preferentially at the ice growth front. The effect of different ensembles with different simulation systems on the anisotropy in the interface structure is also investigated.

Molecular dynamics study on the nucleation of methane + tetrahydrofuran mixed guest hydrate

The nucleation of methane (CH4), tetrahydrofuran (THF), and CH4 + THF hydrates are investigated by microsecond MD simulations. These three systems exhibit distinct structural developments in the aqueous phase quantified by the formation of cage structures of hydrogen bonded water molecules. The development of a cluster of cages in the CH4 system is limited by the scarce CH4 molecules in the solution, while in the THF system it is limited by the short lifetime of cages. In the CH4 + THF mixed guest system, a small cluster of caged CH4 molecules can be rapidly stabilized by abundant neighboring cages of THF molecules. Therefore, the induction time of the CH4 + THF mixed guest system is found to be significantly shorter than that of the pure CH4 and pure THF systems. Furthermore, the structure of cages found in the initially formed cage clusters are often different from the typical 5(12)6(n) (n = 0, 2, 3, 4) cages observed in clathrate hydrate systems. The cluster of cages may grow or transform into structure I or II clathrate hydrate in the later stages.

Effects of thermodynamic inhibitors on the dissociation of methane hydrate: a molecular dynamics study

We investigate the effects of methanol and NaCl, which are known as thermodynamic hydrate inhibitors, on the dissociation kinetics of methane hydrate in aqueous solutions by using molecular dynamics simulations. It is shown that the dissociation rate is not constant but changes with time. The dissociation rate in the initial stage is increased by methanol whereas it is decreased by NaCl. This difference arises from the opposite effects of the two thermodynamic inhibitors on the hydration free energy of methane. The dissociation rate of methane hydrate is increased by the formation of methane bubbles in the aqueous phase because the bubbles absorb surrounding methane molecules. It is found that both methanol and NaCl facilitate the bubble formation. However, their mechanisms are completely different from each other. The presence of ions enhances the hydrophobic interactions between methane molecules. In addition, the ions in the solution cause a highly non-uniform distribution of dissolved methane molecules. These two effects result in the easy formation of bubbles in the NaCl solution. In contrast, methanol assists the bubble formation because of its amphiphilic character.

A molecular dynamics study of model SI clathrate hydrates: the effect of guest size and guest–water interaction on decomposition kinetics

One of the options suggested for methane recovery from natural gas hydrates is molecular replacement of methane by suitable guests like CO₂ and N₂.