Structural and thermodynamical properties of charged hard spheres in a mixture with core-softened model solvent

Abstract

The canonical Monte Carlo computer simulations and integral equation theory were applied to examine the structural and thermodynamic properties of a mixture of ions and a core-softened fluid molecules. The positive and negative ions forming a +1:-1 salt were modeled as charged hard spheres, immersed in the dielectric medium. It was shown previously that the core-softened fluid under study is characterized by a set of structural, thermodynamic, and dynamic anomalies. The principal objective of this work was to elucidate how the presence of ions alters this behavior. The structural properties of the mixtures are discussed in terms of the pair distribution functions; in addition, the pair contribution to the excess entropy was calculated. Thermodynamic properties are investigated by using the dependencies of energy and compressibility factor on density, composition of the mixture, and reduced temperature. The heat capacity was also evaluated. Our principal findings concern the description of structural anomalies in the mixture, the dependence of the temperature of maximum density on the ionic concentration, and establishing the regions delimiting the structural and thermodynamic anomalies of the model mixture.