Pair potential hard spheres

The reference fluid which consists by TPT of non-bonded nitrogen atoms represents the so-called non-associated limit (NAL) of the hard molecular fluid. The nitrogen atoms interact as hard spheres with the diameter ra via the hard sphere pair potential. The density functional theoretical description of the NAL falls back on that which are used by the spherical DFT approach. The latter provides beside other a suitable description for the inhomogeneous hard sphere fluid. 

A schematic illustration of the hard-sphere pair potential is depicted in Fig. 1.4. 

A few of the simpler pair potentials are listed below, (a) The potential for hard spheres of diameter a... 

In the theory of the liquid state, the hard-sphere model plays an important role. For hard spheres, the pair interaction potential V r) = qo for r < J, where d is the particle diameter, whereas V(r) = 0 for r s d. The stmcture of a simple fluid, such as argon, is very similar to that of a hard-sphere fluid. Hard-sphere atoms do, of course, not exist. Certain model colloids, however, come very close to hard-sphere behaviour. These systems have been studied in much detail and some results will be quoted below. 

However, before proceeding with the description of simulation data, we would like to comment the theoretical background. Similarly to the previous example, in order to obtain the pair correlation function of matrix spheres we solve the common Ornstein-Zernike equation complemented by the PY closure. Next, we would like to consider the adsorption of a hard sphere fluid in a microporous environment provided by a disordered matrix of permeable species. The fluid to be adsorbed is considered at density pj = pj-Of. The equilibrium between an adsorbed fluid and its bulk counterpart (i.e., in the absence of the matrix) occurs at constant chemical potential. However, in the theoretical procedure we need to choose the value for the fluid density first, and calculate the chemical potential afterwards. The ROZ equations, (22) and (23), are applied to decribe the fluid-matrix and fluid-fluid correlations. These correlations are considered by using the PY closure, such that the ROZ equations take the Madden-Glandt form as in the previous example. The structural properties in terms of the pair correlation functions (the fluid-matrix function is of special interest for models with permeabihty) cannot represent the only issue to investigate. Moreover, to perform comparisons of the structure under different conditions we need to calculate the adsorption isotherms pf jSpf). The chemical potential of a... 

Now, we would like to investigate adsorption of another fluid of species / in the pore filled by the matrix. The fluid/ outside the pore has the chemical potential at equilibrium the adsorbed fluid / reaches the density distribution pf z). The pair distribution of / particles is characterized by the inhomogeneous correlation function /z (l,2). The matrix and fluid species are denoted by 0 and 1. We assume the simplest form of the interactions between particles and between particles and pore walls, choosing both species as hard spheres of unit diameter... 

In the numerical solution the matrix structure is evaluated from Eqs. (44)-(46). Then Eqs. (47)-(49) with corresponding closure approximations are solved. Details of the solution have been presented in Refs. 32 and 33. Briefly, the numerical algorithm uses an expansion of the two-particle functions into a Fourier-Bessel series. The three-fold integrations are then reduced to sums of one-dimensional integrations. In the case of hard-sphere potentials, the BGY equation contains the delta function due to the derivative of the pair interactions. Therefore, the integrals in Eqs. (48) and (49) are onefold and contain the contact values of the functions... 

Alder and Wainwright gave MD treatments of particles whose pair potential was very simple, typically the square well potential and the hard sphere potential. Rahman (1964) simulated liquid argon in 1964, and the subject has shown exponential growth since then. The 1970s saw a transition from atomic systems... 

The simplest way to treat the solvent molecules of an electrolyte explicitly is to represent them as hard spheres, whereas the electrostatic contribution of the solvent is expressed implicitly by a uniform dielectric medium in which charged hard-sphere ions interact. A schematic representation is shown in Figure 2(a) for the case of an idealized situation in which the cations, anions, and solvent have the same diameters. This is the solvent primitive model (SPM), first named by Davis and coworkers [15,16] but appearing earlier in other studies [17]. As shown in Figure 2(b), the interaction potential of a pair of particles (ions or solvent molecule), i and j, in the SPM are ... 

Instead of the hard-sphere model, the Lennard-Jones (LJ) interaction pair potential can be used to describe soft-core repulsion and dispersion forces. The LJ interaction potential is... 

The second generalization is the reinterpretation of the excluded volume per particle V(). Realizing that only binary collisions are likely in a low-density gas, van der Waals suggested the value Ina /I for hard spheres of diameter a and for particles which were modeled as hard spheres with attractive tails. Thus, for the Lennard-Jones fluid where the pair potential actually is... 

We present an improved model for the flocculation of a dispersion of hard spheres in the presence of non-adsorbing polymer. The pair potential is derived from a recent theory for interacting polymer near a flat surface, and is a function of the depletion thickness. This thickness is of the order of the radius of gyration in dilute polymer solutions but decreases when the coils in solution begin to overlap. Flocculation occurs when the osmotic attraction energy, which is a consequence of the depletion, outweighs the loss in configurational entropy of the dispersed particles. Our analysis differs from that of De Hek and Vrij with respect to the dependence of the depletion thickness on the polymer concentration (i.e., we do not consider the polymer coils to be hard spheres) and to the stability criterion used (binodal, not spinodal phase separation conditions). 

Equation 8 was also applied by Sperry (12), although the underlying assumptions are different in his model. There is also a close analogy between Equation 8 and the pair potential used by De Hek and Vrij. Indeed, Equation 4 of Ref. 6 reduces to our Equation 8 for H = 0, provided that 2A is interpreted as the hard sphere diameter of the polymer molecule. Hence, in dilute solutions (where A a rg) the two approaches are very similar. However, in our model A is a function of the polymer concentration. Because most experimental depletion studies are carried out at values for that are comparable in magnitude to <)>, our model... 

The crucial question is at what value of <)> is the attraction high enough to induce phase separation De Hek and Vrij (6) assume that the critical flocculation concentration is equivalent to the phase separation condition defined by the spinodal point. From the pair potential between two hard spheres in a polymer solution they calculate the second virial coefficient B2 for the particles, and derive from the spinodal condition that if B2 = 1/2 (where is the volume fraction of particles in the dispersion) phase separation occurs. For a system in thermodynamic equilibrium, two phases coexist if the chemical potential of the hard spheres is the same in the dispersion and in the floe phase (i.e., the binodal condition). 

Any fundamental study of the rheology of concentrated suspensions necessitates the use of simple systems of well-defined geometry and where the surface characteristics of the particles are well established. For that purpose well-characterized polymer particles of narrow size distribution are used in aqueous or non-aqueous systems. For interpretation of the rheological results, the inter-particle pair-potential must be well-defined and theories must be available for its calculation. The simplest system to consider is that where the pair potential may be represented by a hard sphere model. This, for example, is the case for polystyrene latex dispersions in organic solvents such as benzyl alcohol or cresol, whereby electrostatic interactions are well screened (1). Concentrated dispersions in non-polar media in which the particles are stabilized by a "built-in" stabilizer layer, may also be used, since the pair-potential can be represented by a hard-sphere interaction, where the hard sphere radius is given by the particles radius plus the adsorbed layer thickness. Systems of this type have been recently studied by Croucher and coworkers. (10,11) and Strivens (12). 

In order to utilise our colloids as near hard spheres in terms of the thermodynamics we need to account for the presence of the medium and the species it contains. If the ions and molecules intervening between a pair of colloidal particles are small relative to the colloidal species we can treat the medium as a continuum. The role of the molecules and ions can be allowed for by the use of pair potentials between particles. These can be determined so as to include the role of the solution species as an energy of interaction with distance. The limit of the medium forms the boundary of the system and so determines its volume. We can consider the thermodynamic properties of the colloidal system as those in excess of the solvent. The pressure exerted by the colloidal species is now that in excess of the solvent, and is the osmotic pressure II of the colloid. These ideas form the basis of pseudo one-component thermodynamics. This allows us to calculate an elastic rheological property. Let us consider some important thermodynamic quantities for the system. We may apply the first law of thermodynamics to the system. The work done in an osmotic pressure and volume experiment on the colloidal system is related to the excess heat adsorbed d Q and the internal energy change d E ... 

The term pair potential that contains only the attractive potential, because the repulsion effects have been allowed for by the effective volume fraction and hard sphere diameter. The new potential can be defined as... 

The program of calculating the BO-level potentials from Schroedinger level cannot often be carried through with the accuracy required for the intermolecular forces in solution theory. (9.) Fortunately a great deal can be learned through the study of BO-level models in which the N-body potential is pairwise additive (as in Eq. (3)) and in which the pair potentials have very simple forms. (2, 3, 6) Thus for the hard sphere fluid we have, with a=sphere diameter,... 

Until very recently there was no information about how an MM pair potential should look, based upon calculations from the deeper BO level. In the simplest BO level model for an ionic solution the solvent molecules are represented as hard spheres with centered point dipoles and the ions as hard spheres with centered charges. Now there are two sets of calculations, (16,17) by very different approximation methods, for this model where all of the spheres are 3A in diameter, where the dipole moments are near 1 Debye, and where the ions are singly charged. The temperature is 25° and the solvent concentration is about 50M, corresponding to a liquid state. The dielectric constant of the model solvent is believed to be near 9 6. 

One of the further refinements which seems desirable is to modify Eq. (9) so that it has wiggles (damped oscillatory behavior). Wiggles are expected in any realistic MM-level pair potential as a consequence of the molecular structure of the solvent (2,3,10,11,21,22) they would be found even for two hard sphere solute particles in a hard-sphere liquid or for two H2I80 solute molecules in ordinary liquid HpO, and are found in simulation studies of solutions based on BO-level models. In ionic solutions in a polar solvent another source of wiggles, evidenced in Fig. 2, may be associated with an oscillatory nonlocal dielectric function e(r). ( 36) These various studies may be used to guide the introduction of wiggles into Eq. (9) in a realistic way. 

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