RESUMEN
In this work we have assessed the ability of a recently proposed three-dimensional integral equation approach to describe the explicit spatial distribution of molecular hydrogen confined in a crystal formed by short-capped nanotubes of C50 H10. To that aim we have resorted to extensive molecular simulation calculations whose results have been compared with our three-dimensional integral equation approximation. We have first tested the ability of a single C50 H10 nanocage for the encapsulation of H2 by means of molecular dynamics simulations, in particular using targeted molecular dynamics to estimate the binding Gibbs energy of a host hydrogen molecule inside the nanocage. Then, we have investigated the adsorption isotherm of the nanocage crystal using grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations in order to evaluate the maximum load of molecular hydrogen. For a packing close to the maximum load explicit hydrogen density maps and density profiles have been determined using molecular dynamics simulations and the three-dimensional Ornstein-Zernike equation with a hypernetted chain closure. In these conditions of extremely tight confinement the theoretical approach has shown to be able to reproduce the three-dimensional structure of the adsorbed fluid with accuracy down to the finest details.
RESUMEN
An extension of the well established Reverse Monte Carlo (RMC) method for modeling systems under close confinement has been developed. The method overcomes limitations induced by close confinement in systems such as fluids adsorbed in microporous materials. As a test of the method, we investigate a model system of (36)Ar adsorbed into two zeolites with significantly different pore sizes: Silicalite-I (a pure silica form of ZSM-5 zeolite, characterized by relatively narrow channels forming a 3D network) at partial and full loadings and siliceous Faujasite (which exhibits relatively wide channels and large cavities). The model systems are simulated using grand canonical Monte Carlo and, in each case, its structure factor is used as input for the proposed method, which shows a rapid convergence and yields an adsorbate microscopic structure in good agreement with that of the model system, even to the level of three body correlations, when these are induced by the confining media. The application to experimental systems is straightforward incorporating factors such as the experimental resolution and appropriate q-sampling, along the lines of previous experiences of RMC modeling of powder diffraction data including Bragg and diffuse scattering.
RESUMEN
We investigate Monte Carlo simulation strategies for determining the effective ("depletion") potential between a pair of hard spheres immersed in a dense sea of much smaller hard spheres. Two routes to the depletion potential are considered. The first is based on estimates of the insertion probability of one big sphere in the presence of the other; we describe and compare three such methods. The second route exploits collective (cluster) updating to sample the depletion potential as a function of the separation of the big particles; we describe two such methods. For both routes, we find that the sampling efficiency at high densities of small particles can be enhanced considerably by exploiting "geometrical shortcuts" that focus the computational effort on a subset of small particles. All the methods we describe are readily extendable to particles interacting via arbitrary potentials.
