Local solvent compression determination

Local solvent compression. The next application of the solvato-chromic data will be to determine the magnitude of the local compression of a supercritical fluid solvent in the immediate environment of the solute. The of a dye such as phenol blue can be predicted in liquids where no specific interactions are present by treating the solvent as a homogeneous polarizable dielectric (22,29). The intrinsic "solvent strength", E, °, describes dispersion, Induction, and dipole-dipole forces and is given by (22). 

Following earlier work by Wood et al., Luo and Tucker have relaxed the constant density restriction, and developed a continuum model in which the dielectric constant may be position-dependent. This dielectric function, s(7), is defined, at each point r in the fluid, in terms of the local density of the fluid at , pi(f), which is itself determined by the local values of the electric field and the compressibility. However, the local value of the electric field at 7 must be found from electrostatic equations (see Poisson-Boltzmann Type Equations Numerical Methods) which depend upon the dielectric function s(r) everywhere. Hence, all of the relevant equations must be solved self-consistently, and this is done using a numerical grid algorithm (see Poisson-Boltzmann Type Equations Numerical Methods). The result of such calculations are the density profile of the fluid around the solute and the position-dependent electric field, from which the free energy of solvation may be evaluated. The effects of solvent compression on solvation energetics can be quite substantial. Compression-induced enhancements to the solvation free energy of nearly 15 kcal mol" have been calculated for molecular ions in SC water at Tt = 1.01 and pr = 0.8. ... 

The local density of solvent about the solute may be determined by comparing the experimental and calculated curves. Consider points A and B in Figure 5 at a constant value of E, i.e., 55 kcal/mol. A hypothetical homogeneous fluid at point B gives the same "solvent strength" as he actual fluid at point A. The local density about the solute exceeds the bulk density due to compression, such that... 

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