Coarse Grained Modeling of The Interface Between Water and Heterogeneous Surfaces

TL;DR

This study uses coarse-grained models to analyze how water interacts with heterogeneous surfaces, revealing that small attractive forces keep the interface close to the surface but cause large, uneven fluctuations influenced by surface patches.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the spatially heterogeneous interfacial fluctuations of water on patchy surfaces using coarse-grained modeling techniques.

Findings

Small attractive interactions keep the interface near the substrate.

Interfacial fluctuations are large and spatially heterogeneous.

Implications for the assembly of heterogeneous surfaces.

Abstract

Using coarse grained models we investigate the behavior of water adjacent to an extended hydrophobic surface peppered with various fractions of hydrophilic patches of different sizes. We study the spatial dependence of the mean interface height, the solvent density fluctuations related to drying the patchy substrate, and the spatial dependence of interfacial fluctuations. We find that adding small uniform attractive interactions between the substrate and solvent cause the mean position of the interface to be very close to the substrate. Nevertheless, the interfacial fluctuations are large and spatially heterogeneous in response to the underlying patchy substrate. We discuss the implications of these findings to the assembly of heterogeneous surfaces.