Surface tension of quantum fluids from molecular simulations

XC Zhao and JK Johnson and CE Rasmussen, JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL PHYSICS, 120, 8707-8715 (2004).

DOI: 10.1063/1.1695317

We present the first molecular simulations of the vapor-liquid surface tension of quantum,liquids. The path integral formalism of Feynman was used to account for the quantum mechanical behavior of both the liquid and the vapor. A replica-data parallel algorithm was implemented to achieve good parallel performance of the simulation code on at least 32 processors. We have computed the surface tension and the vapor-liquid phase diagram of pure hydrogen over the temperature range 18-30 K and pure deuterium from 19 to 34 K. The simulation results for surface tension and vapor-liquid orthobaric densities are in very good agreement with experimental data. We have computed the interfacial properties of hydrogen-deuterium mixtures over the entire concentration range at 20.4 and 24 K. The calculated equilibrium compositions of the mixtures are in excellent agreement with experimental data. The computed mixture surface tension shows negative deviations from ideal solution behavior,,in agreement with experimental data and predictions from Prigogine's theory. The magnitude of the deviations at 20.4 K are substantially larger from simulations and from theory than from experiments. We conclude that the experimentally measured mixture surface tension values are systematically too high. Analysis of the concentration profiles in the interfacial region shows that the nonideal behavior can be described entirely by segregation of H-2 to the interface, indicating that H-2 acts as a surfactant in H-2-D-2 mixtures. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.

Return to Publications page