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Published on: September 17, 2021
Unravelling the peculiar nucleation mechanisms for non-ideal binary mixtures with atomistic simulations
1Department of Chemistry, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803-1804, USA.
Abstract:
Recent experiments reveal unusual nucleation behavior for seemingly simple mixtures that cannot be described by the classical theory. Molecular simulations using a combination of aggregation-volume-bias Monte Carlo, umbrella sampling, and histogram reweighting methods were carried out to study the nucleation events involved in the water/ethanol, water/n-nonane, and n-nonane/ethanol mixtures. These simulations reproduced their different nonideal behaviors observed by the experiments. Furthermore, the finding of their strikingly distinct mechanisms, as implied from the calculated free-energy maps, challenges the current theoretical description of this phenomenon.
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