Heterogeneous surface charge confining an electrolyte solution

Abstract

The structure of dilute electrolyte solutions close to a surface carrying a spatially inhomogeneous surface charge distribution is investigated by means of classical density functional theory (DFT) within the approach of fundamental measure theory (FMT). For electrolyte solutions the influence of these inhomogeneities is particularly strong because the corresponding characteristic length scale is the Debye length, which is large compared to molecular sizes. Here a fully three-dimensional investigation is performed, which accounts explicitly for the solvent particles, and thus provides insight into effects caused by ion-solvent coupling. The present study introduces a versatile framework to analyze a broad range of types of surface charge heterogeneities even beyond the linear response regime. This reveals a sensitive dependence of the number density profiles of the fluid components and of the electrostatic potential on the magnitude of the charge as well as on details of the surface charge patterns at small scales.

References in corpus (17)

• Solvation Effects in Near-Critical Binary Mixtures
• Fluctuation-Induced Interaction between Randomly Charged Dielectrics
• Interaction between Heterogeneously Charged Surfaces: Surface Patches and Charge Modulation
• Local theory for ions in binary liquid mixtures
• Asymmetric Coulomb fluids at randomly charged dielectric interfaces: Anti-fragility, overcharging and charge inversion
• Electrostatics of Patchy Surfaces
• Multiscale modeling of a rectifying bipolar nanopore: explicit-water versus implicit-water simulations
• Interaction between random heterogeneously charged surfaces in an electrolyte solution
• Electrostatic Attraction between Overall Neutral Surfaces
• Osmotic pressure between arbitrarily charged surfaces: a revisited approach
• Strong coupling electrostatics for randomly charged surfaces: Antifragility and effective interactions
• Electric double layers with surface charge modulations: Novel exact Poisson-Boltzmann solutions
• Screened Coulomb Interactions With Non-uniform Surface Charge
• The structure of fluids with impurities
• Electrolyte solutions at heterogeneously charged substrates
• Adsorption of polyelectrolytes on charged microscopically patterned surfaces
• Ion-mediated interactions between net-neutral slabs: Weak and strong disorder effects

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Donnan equilibrium in charged slit-pores from a hybrid nonequilibrium Molecular Dynamics / Monte Carlo method with ions and solvent exchange
• Electrolytes in regimes of strong confinements: surface charge modulations, osmotic equilibrium and electroneutrality
• Interaction between two overall neutral charged microscopically patterned surfaces
• Structure of electrolyte solutions at non-uniformly charged surfaces on a variety of length scales