Molecular dynamics study of phase separation in fluids with chemical reactions

Segregation disrupts the Arrhenius behavior of an isomerization reaction

Coexistence of segregation and interconversion or isomerization reaction among molecular species leads to fascinating structure formation in the biological and chemical worlds. Using Monte Carlo simulations of the prototype Ising model, we explore the chemical kinetics of such a system consisting of a binary mixture of isomers. Our results reveal that even though the two concerned processes are individually Arrhenius in nature, the Arrhenius behavior of the isomerization reaction gets significantly disrupted due to an interplay of the nonconserved dynamics of the reaction and the conserved diffusive dynamics of segregation. The approach used here can be potentially adapted to understand reaction kinetics of more complex reactions.

Morphology formation in binary mixtures upon gradual destabilisation

Spontaneous liquid-liquid phase separation is commonly understood in terms of phenomenological mean-field theories. These theories correctly predict the structural features of the fluid at sufficiently long time scales and wavelengths. However, these conditions are not met in various examples in biology and materials science where the mixture is slowly destabilised, and phase separation is strongly affected by critical thermal fluctuations. We propose a mechanism of pretransitional structuring of a mixture that approaches the miscibility gap and predict scaling relations that describe how the characteristic feature size of the emerging morphology decreases with an increasing quench rate. These predictions quantitatively agree with our kinetic Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations of a phase-separating binary mixture, as well as with previously reported experimental observations. We discuss how these predictions are affected by non-conserved order parameters (e.g., due to chemical reactions or alignment of liquid-crystalline molecules), hydrodynamics and active transport.

Field-Embedded Particles Driven by Active Flips

Systems of independent active particles embedded into a fluctuating environment are relevant to many areas of soft-matter science. We use a minimal model of noninteracting spin-carrying Brownian particles in a Gaussian field and show that activity-driven spin dynamics leads to patterned order. We find that the competition between mediated interactions and active noise alone can yield such diverse behaviors as phase transitions and microphase separation, from lamellar up to hexagonal ordering of clusters of opposite magnetization. These rest on complex multibody interactions. We find regimes of stationary patterns, but also dynamical regimes of relentless birth and growth of lumps of magnetization opposite of the surrounding one. Our approach combines Monte Carlo simulations with analytical methods based on dynamical density functional approaches.

Transient dynamical responses of a charged binary colloid in an electric field

In a model system of oppositely charged colloids we study via Brownian dynamics simulation the dynamical response as the system approaches steady states upon application of a constant electric field. The system is known to form patterns of like charges in the transverse plane to the field that are elongated along the field as lanes. We show that an increase in structural heterogeneity leads to non-Gaussian tails in the probability distribution of particle displacements [self van Hove functions (self-vHfs)]. The self-diffusion coefficient depends upon the time of the observations and consequently indicates aging in the system. However, the anomalies in the self-vHfs and diffusion do not appear during the melting of the structures.

Structuring of Fluid Adlayers upon Ongoing Unimolecular Adsorption

Fluids with spatial density variations of single or mixed molecules play a key role in biophysics, soft matter, and materials science. The fluid structures usually form via spinodal decomposition or nucleation following an instantaneous destabilization of the initially disordered fluid. However, in practice, an instantaneous quench is often not viable, and the rate of destabilization may be gradual rather than instantaneous. In this work we show that the commonly used phenomenological descriptions of fluid structuring are inadequate under these conditions. We come to that conclusion in the context of surface catalysis, where we employ kinetic Monte Carlo simulations to describe the unimolecular adsorption of gaseous molecules onto a metal surface. The adsorbates diffuse at the surface and, as a consequence of lateral interactions and due to an ongoing increase of the surface coverage, phase separate into coexisting low- and high-density regions. The typical size of these regions turns out to depend much more strongly on the rate of adsorption than predicted from recently reported phenomenological models. We discuss how this finding contributes to the fundamental understanding of the crossover from liquid-liquid to liquid-solid demixing of solution-cast polymer blends.

Structuring polymer gels via catalytic reactions

We use computer simulations to investigate how a catalytic reaction in a polymer sol can induce the formation of a polymer gel. To this aim we consider a solution of homopolymers in which freely-diffusing catalysts convert the originally repulsive A monomers into attractive B ones. We find that at low temperatures this reaction transforms the polymer solution into a physical gel that has a remarkably regular mesostructure in the form of a cluster phase, absent in the usual homopolymer gels obtained by a quench in temperature. We investigate how this microstructuring depends on catalyst concentration, temperature, and polymer density and show that the dynamics for its formation can be understood in a semi-quantitative manner using the interaction potentials between the particles as input. The structuring of the copolymers and the AB sequences resulting from the reactions can be discussed in the context of the phase behaviour of correlated random copolymers. The location of the spinodal line as found in our simulations is consistent with analytical predictions. Finally, we show that the observed structuring depends not only on the chemical distribution of the A and B monomers but also on the mode of formation of this distribution.

Dissipative particle dynamics study of phase separation in binary fluid mixtures in periodic and confined domains

We investigate the phase separation behavior of binary mixtures in two-dimensional periodic and confined domains using dissipative particle dynamics. Two canonical problems of fluid mechanics are considered for the confined domains: square cavity with no-slip walls and lid-driven cavity with one driven wall. The dynamics is studied for both weakly and strongly separating mixtures and different area fractions. The phase separation process is analyzed using the structure factor and the total interface length. The dynamics of phase separation in the square cavity and lid-driven cavity are observed to be significantly slower when compared to the dynamics in the periodic domain. The presence of the no-slip walls and the inertial effects significantly influences the separation dynamics. Finally, we show that the growth exponent for the strongly separating case is invariant to changes in the inter-species repulsion parameter.