EFFECTS AND ROLE OF WATER ENVIRONMENT ON A GEMINAL HYDROXYLATED SILICA SURFACE — SELF-CONSISTENT CHARGE DENSITY FUNCTIONAL TIGHT BINDING THEORY BASED MOLECULAR DYNAMICS SIMULATION

Abstract

The presence of aqueous solution is inevitable in complex systems involving biological and material components and could affect the interaction between them substantially. To properly simulate such an interaction system, it is necessary to quantitatively explore the effects and specific roles of the water environment on the material surface. In this work, a silica surface was adopted as an example to study the impact of water environment ( 144H2O ) on the structure and energetics using a self-consistent charge density functional tight binding/molecular dynamic method. First, we demonstrated that the silica surface in a vacuum involves a large deformation due to the formation of hydrogen bonds among the surface silanols; in contrast, the deformation is eased in water environment because water molecules could locate in between the silanols and form many hydrogen bonds with the silanols. Therefore, water molecules play an important role to maintain surface from not getting heavily deformed. Our work not only tested the feasible computational methodology of studying nanoscale large systems under water environment at a quantum-mechanical level of theory, but also provided clear evidence on the impact of water environment to the inorganic surface.