Can we describe charged nanoparticles with electrolyte theories? Insight from mesoscopic simulation techniques

Abstract

Electrolyte theories enable to describe the structural and dynamical properties of simple electrolytes in solution, such as sodium chloride in water. Using these theories for aqueous solutions of charged nanoparticles is a straightforward route to extract their charge and size from experimental data. Nevertheless, for such strongly asymmetric electrolytes, the validity of the underlying approximations have never been properly challenged with exact simulation results. In the present work, well established mesoscopic numerical simulations are used to challenge the ability of advanced electrolyte theories to predict the electrical conductivity of suspensions of charged nanoparticles, in the salt-free case. The theories under investigation are based on the Debye-Fuoss-Onsager treatment of electrolyte transport. When the nanoparticles are small enough (about 1 nm large), the theoretical results agree remarkably well with the simulation ones, even in the high concentration regime (volume fraction of nanoparticles larger than 3%). Strikingly, for highly charged nanoparticles, the theory is able to capture the non-monotonic variation of the ratio of the electrical conductivity to its value at infinite dilution (ideal value) as a function of the concentration. However, the tested theories fail to describe the conductivity of suspensions containing larger nanoparticles (e.g. of diameter 4 nm). Finally, only small charged nanoparticles can be considered as ions, as far as electrolyte theories are concerned.