The behavior of ions near a charged wall-dependence on ion size, concentration, and surface charge.

Abstract

A renormalization of the 3D-RISM-HNC integral equation is used to study the solvent and ion distributions at neutral and negatively charged planar atomistic surfaces. The charge density of the surfaces ranged from 0.0 to 0.4116 C/m(2), and the modeled electrolyte solutions consist of the salts NaCl, KCl, and CsCl at concentrations of 0.1, 0.25, and 1.0 M in SPC/E water. The results are qualitatively compared to the results from other integral equation methods and simulations for similar models. We find that the 3D-IEs predict an electric multilayer screening behavior in the solvent and ion distributions in contrast to the double layer anticipated from Poisson-Boltzmann theory. It is observed that the cation size has a significant effect on the distributions near the surface up to three solvation layers beyond which the behavior is the same among the different cations. The response of the distributions to the charged surface is described as an increase in ion and solvent density near the wall. The higher concentration solutions screen the electrostatic source more strongly at the wall as expected. The importance of ion-solvent and ion-ion correlations near the surface is shown through three-body correlation functions which are obtainable from the 3D-IEs in this study.