Kinetic Analysis on Nanoparticle Condensation by Molecular Dynamics

Abstract

Condensation on a cubic seed particle was simulated by classical molecular dynamics. Seed size and supersaturation ratio of the system were the factors that were examined in order to observe the effects of the dimension of seeds and thermodynamic conditions. Two stages of nucleation were observed in the phenomenon, where the first stage is from the seed growth and the second from homogeneous nucleation. Therefore, the nucleation rate and growth rate were each calculated by the Yasuoka-Matsumoto method. As seed size increased the growth rate decreased, but there was no clear seed influence on the homogeneous nucleation characteristics. Besides the classical nucleation theory, cluster formation free energy and kinetic analysis were conducted. The free energy in the exponential term of the classical nucleation theory and that obtained from the cluster formation free energy showed different characteristics.