Nonmonotonic crossover from adsorption to desorption in supercritical fluid near a weakly attractive surface

Abstract

The density profiles of a supercritical Lennard-Jones fluid near a weakly attractive surface are used to study the excess adsorption Gamma of supercritical fluid in a wide density range. We report the observation of two extrema of Gamma along the isotherm as a function of density. The attractive fluid-wall interaction potential tends to make Gamma positive, whereas the missing neighbor effect tends to make Gamma negative. The latter effect enhances with increasing fluid density due to the growth of the fluid-fluid attraction that results in the crossover from adsorption to depletion (Gamma=0) at some particular fluid density. With approaching the critical point, Gamma decreases as the bulk correlation length and passes through a minimum when the average density of confined fluid is close to the bulk critical density. Variation of Gamma with temperature and density is determined by the monotonic trend from adsorption to desorption upon increasing fluid density and by the increase of the absolute value of Gamma when approaching the critical point. Interplay of these trends results in two extrema of Gamma in the temperature-density plane. This effect may be responsible for the crossover from adsorption to desorption with approaching the critical temperature observed experimentally along the isotherms and along the critical isochore. The density profiles of a supercritical fluid are found to be exponential and the power law behavior predicted theoretically was not detected even when the bulk correlation length xi achieves 11 molecular diameters.