Towards composite spheres as building blocks for structured molecules

In order to design a flexible molecular model that mimics the chemical moieties of a polyatomic molecule, we propose the 'composite-sphere' model that can assemble the essential elements to produce the structure of the target molecule. This is likened to the polymerization process where monomers assemble to form the polymer. The assemblage is built into the pair interaction potentials which can 'react' (figuratively) with selective pieces into various bonds. In addition, we preserve the spherical symmetries of the individual pair potentials so that the isotropic Ornstein-Zernike equation (OZ) for multi-component mixtures can be used as a theoretical framework. We first test our approach on generating a dumbbell molecule. An equimolar binary mixture of hard spheres and square-well spheres are allowed to react to form a dimer. As the bond length shrinks to zero, we create a site-site model of a Janus-like molecule with a repulsive moiety and an attractive moiety. We employ the zero-separation (ZSEP) closure to solve the OZ equations. The structure and thermodynamic properties are calculated at three isotherms and at several densities and the results are compared with Monte Carlo simulations. The close agreement achieved demonstrates that the ZSEP closure is a reliable theory for this composite-sphere fluid model.