Quantifying interfacial tensions of surface nanobubbles: How far can Young's equation explain?

Nanobubbles at solid-liquid interfaces play a key role in various physicochemical phenomena and it is crucial to understand their unique properties. However, little is known about their interfacial tensions due to the lack of reliable calculation methods. Based on mechanical and thermodynamic insights, we quantified for the first time the liquid-gas, solid-liquid, and solid-gas interfacial tensions of submicron-sized nitrogen bubbles at graphite-water interfaces using molecular dynamics (MD) analysis. It was revealed that Young's equation holds even for nanobubbles with different radii. We found that the liquid-gas and solid-liquid interfacial tensions were not largely affected by the gas density inside the nanobubbles. In contrast, the size effect on the solid-gas interfacial tension was observed, namely, the value dramatically decreased upon an increase in the gas density due to gas adsorption on the solid surface. However, our quantitative evaluation also revealed that the gas density effect on the contact angles is negligible when the footprint radius is larger than 50 nm, which is a typical range observed in experiments, and thus the flat shape and stabilization of submicron-sized surface bubbles observed in experiments cannot be explained only by the changes in interfacial tensions due to the van der Waals interaction-induced gas adsorption, namely by Young's equation without introducing the pinning effect. Based on our analysis, it was clarified that additional factors such as the differences in the studied systems are needed to explain the unresolved open issues - a satisfactory explanation for the nanobubbles in MD simulations being ultradense, non-flat, and stable without pinning.

Water on hydroxylated silica surfaces: Work of adhesion, interfacial entropy, and droplet wetting

In the last few years, much attention has been devoted to the control of the wettability properties of surfaces modified with functional groups. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation is one of the powerful tools for microscopic analysis providing visual images and mean geometrical shapes of the contact line, e.g., of nanoscale droplets on solid surfaces, while profound understanding of wetting demands quantitative evaluation of the solid-liquid (SL) interfacial tension. In the present work, we examined the wetting of water on neutral and regular hydroxylated silica surfaces with five different area densities of OH groups ρ_A ^OH, ranging from a non-hydroxylated surface to a fully hydroxylated one through two theoretical methods: thermodynamic integration (TI) and MD simulations of quasi-two-dimensional equilibrium droplets. For the former, the work of adhesion needed to quasi-statically strip the water film off the solid surface was computed by the phantom wall TI scheme to evaluate the SL interfacial free energy, whereas for the latter, the apparent contact angle θ_app was calculated from the droplet density distribution. The theoretical contact angle θ_YD and the apparent one θ_app, both indicating the enhancement of wettability by an increase in ρ_A ^OH, presented good quantitative agreement, especially for non-hydroxylated and highly hydroxylated surfaces. On partially hydroxylated surfaces, in which θ_YD and θ_app slightly deviated, the Brownian motion of the droplet was suppressed, possibly due to the pinning of the contact line around the hydroxyl groups. Relations between work of adhesion, interfacial energy, and entropy loss were also analyzed, and their influence on the wettability was discussed.

Microscopic Origin of Different Hydration Patterns of para-Nitrophenol and Its Anion: A Study Combining Multiconfigurational Calculations and the Free-Energy Gradient Method

A theoretical study of the solvatochromic shifts of para-nitrophenol ( pNP) and para-nitrophenolate anion ( pNP^-) in aqueous solution is presented using a QM/MM methodology with molecular dynamics simulation. The optimized structures in aqueous solution are obtained using both the polarizable continuum and the free-energy gradient methods. For pNP, the calculated redshifts at the CASPT2 (12,10) level are, respectively, 0.71 and 0.94 eV, in good agreement with the experimental ones (0.80-0.83 eV), whereas for pNP^-, they are small. The difference between the solvatochromic shifts of pNP and pNP^- is calculated as 0.71 eV in good agreement with the experimental one (0.79-0.81 eV). Finally, these shifts are understood in terms of the solvent effect on the solute structure, accurately calculated by the present theoretical treatment.