Evidence for confinement induced phase separation in ethanol-water mixture: a positron annihilation study

Long term phase separation dynamics in liquid crystal-enriched microdroplets obtained from binary fluid mixtures

The dynamics of long term phase separation in binary liquid mixtures remains a subject of fundamental interest. Here, we study a binary liquid mixture, where the minority phase is confined to a liquid crystal (LC)-rich droplet, by investigating the evolution of size, defect and mesogen alignment over time. We track the binary liquid mixture evolving towards equilibrium by visualising the configuration of the liquid crystal droplet through polarisation microscopy. We compare our experimental findings with computational simulations and elucidate differences between bulk phases and confined droplets based on the respective thermodynamics of phase separation. Our work provides insights on how phase transitions on the microscale can deviate from bulk phase diagrams with relevance to other material systems, such as the liquid-liquid phase separation of polymer and protein solutions.

Partition Constant of Binary Mixtures for the Equilibrium between a Bulk and a Confined Phase

It is well-known that the thermodynamic, kinetic and structural properties of fluids, and in particular of water and its solutions, can be drastically affected in nanospaces. A possible consequence of nanoscale confinement of a solution is the partial segregation of its components. Thereby, confinement in nanoporous materials (NPM) has been proposed as a means for the separation of mixtures. In fact, separation science can take great advantage of NPM due to the tunability of their properties as a function of nanostructure, morphology, pore size, and surface chemistry. Alcohol-water mixtures are in this context among the most relevant systems. However, a quantitative thermodynamic description allowing for the prediction of the segregation capabilities as a function of the material-solution characteristics is missing. In the present study we attempt to fill this vacancy, by contributing a thermodynamic treatment for the calculation of the partition coefficient in confinement. Combining the multilayer adsorption model for binary mixtures with the Young equation, we conclude that the liquid-vapor surface tension and the contact angle of the pure substances can be used to predict the separation ability of a particular material for a given mixture to a semiquantitative extent. Moreover, we develop a Kelvin-type equation that relates the partition coefficient to the radius of the pore, the contact angle, and the liquid-vapor surface tensions of the constituents. To assess the validity of our thermodynamic formulation, coarse grained molecular dynamics simulations were performed on models of alcohol-water mixtures confined in cylindrical pores. To this end, a coarse-grained amphiphilic molecule was parametrized to be used in conjunction with the mW potential for water. This amphiphilic model reproduces some of the properties of methanol such as enthalpy of vaporization and liquid-vapor surface tension, and the minimum of the excess enthalpy for the aqueous solution. The partition coefficient turns out to be highly dependent on the molar fraction, on the interaction between the components and the confining matrix, and on the radius of the pore. A remarkable agreement between the theory and the simulations is found for pores of radius larger than 15 Å.

Confinement Effects on Glass-Forming Aqueous Dimethyl Sulfoxide Solutions

Combining broadband dielectric spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance studies, we analyze the reorientation dynamics and the translational diffusion associated with the glassy slowdown of the eutectic aqueous dimethyl sulfoxide solution in nano-sized confinements, explicitly, in silica pores with different diameters and in ficoll and lysozyme matrices at different concentrations. We observe that both rotational and diffusive dynamics are slower and more heterogeneous in the confinements than in the bulk but the degree of these effects depends on the properties of the confinement and differs for the components of the solution. For the hard and the soft matrices, the slowdown and the heterogeneity become more prominent when the size of the confinement is reduced. In addition, the dynamics are more retarded for dimethyl sulfoxide than for water, implying specific guest-host interactions. Moreover, we find that the temperature dependence of the reorientation dynamics and of the translational diffusion differs in severe confinements, indicating a breakdown of the Stokes-Einstein-Debye relation. It is discussed to what extent these confinement effects can be rationalized in the framework of core-shell models, which assume bulk-like and slowed-down motions in central and interfacial confinement regions, respectively.