Stability of a Nonwetting Liquid in a Nanoporous Medium

TL;DR

This paper proposes a physical model explaining how nonwetting liquids form stable states in nanoporous media, emphasizing collective interactions and surface energy effects that match observed behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model describing the stability of nonwetting liquids in nanoporous media based on collective interactions and surface energy considerations.

Findings

Stable states depend on filling factors and temperature.

Surface free energy decrease drives the transition.

Model aligns with experimental volume measurements.

Abstract

A physical mechanism has been proposed to describe the formation of a stable state of a nonwetting liquid after filling of a porous medium at an increased pressure with the subsequent reduction of the overpressure to zero. It has been shown that the observed transition of the system of nonwetting-liquid nanoclusters to the stable state in a narrow range of filling factors and a narrow temperature interval is due to a decrease in the surface free energy without change in the chemical potential owing to the collective interactions between liquid nanoclusters in the neighboring pores. This effectively corresponds to their mutual attraction. The model makes it possible to describe the observed dependences of the volume of the liquid in pores in the stable state on the filling factor and temperature.