Ubiquity of the Micrometer-Thick Interface along a Quartz-Water Boundary

Water-rock interactions determine how the geochemical cycles revolve from the Earth's surface to the deep interior (large T-P intervals). The underlying mechanisms interweave the fluxes of matter, time, and reactivity between fluid phases and solids. The deformation processes of crustal rocks are also known to be significantly affected by the presence or absence of water, typically with the hydrolytic weakening of quartz, olivine, and other silicate minerals. In fact, fluid-rock interactions mechanistically unfold along their interfaces, developing over a certain thickness within the two phases. Diffraction-limited mid-infrared microspectroscopy was employed to monitor the thermodynamic characteristics of liquid water along a quartz boundary. The hyperspectral Fourier transform infrared data set displayed a very strong distance-dependent signature for water over a 1 ± 0.5 μm thickness, while quartz appears unmodified, which is consistent with recent studies. This unexpected thick interface is tested against the geometry of the inclusion, the chemistry of the occluded liquid (especially pH), and the thermal conditions ranging from room temperature to 155 °C. Throughout this range of physicochemical conditions, the micrometer-thick interface is characterized by a ubiquitous, significant shift in the Gibbs free energy of water inside the interfacial layer. This conclusion suggests that the interface-imprinting phenomenon driving this microthick layer has thermodynamic roots that give rise to specific properties along the quartz-water interface. This finding questions the systematic use of the bulk phase data sets to evaluate how water-rock interactions progress in porous media.

Molecular Dynamics of Supercritical Water for Nuclear Data Development

The Canadian supercritical water-cooled reactor was selected as one of the Generation IV International Forum initiatives for reactor design. It uses supercritical light water as a coolant under operating conditions of 25 MPa (250 bar) and 623–898 K. However, the simulation codes used to assess the performance and safety of such a design depend upon the accuracy of available nuclear data parametrizations, which currently do not include models of light water in the supercritical regime. In this paper, we present a study of supercritical water (SCW) through molecular dynamics simulations. Flexible variants of the TIP4P/2005 and simple point charge models for H2O are assessed to determine their ability to reproduce experimental measurements of SCW properties, and their suitability for the future development of nuclear data parametrizations for thermal neutron scattering from SCW. Planned experiments measuring thermal neutron scattering from SCW to inform nuclear data development are also summarized.

Density effect on infrared spectrum for supercritical water in the low- and medium-density region studied by molecular dynamics simulation

The origin of the line shape of the O-H stretch vibrational spectrum is analyzed for supercritical water in the low- and medium-density region by using classical molecular dynamics simulation for the flexible point-charge model, SPC/Fw. The spectrum calculated for the water model is in good agreement with the experimental one in the low-density region. The spectral origins in the low-density region of 0.01-0.04 g cm(-3) are assigned to a sharp peak due to the bond oscillation along the O-H vector and two broad bands due to the rotational coupling, by taking an isolated single molecule as a reference in the low-density limit. The bands due to the rotational coupling reduce in intensity with increasing density as the rotations are more hindered by the hydrogen-bonding interactions, and their intensities increase with increasing temperature due to the accelerated rotational motion. The O-H stretch oscillation in the time correlation function attenuates in a timescale comparable with the lifetime of the hydrogen bonds, and the spectra conditioned by the number of hydrogen bonds are dominantly controlled by the local solvation structure.