Microscopic Structure of Aqueous Alkylamine mixtures: a Computer Simulation Study
Martina Požar, Lena Friedrich, Bernarda Lovrinčević, Michael Paulus, Christian Sternemann, Aurélien Perera
TL;DR
This work addresses the microscopic origin of water-rich X-ray scattering pre-peaks in aqueous alkylamine mixtures by leveraging extensive all-atom MD simulations across multiple water and amine models. It shows that amine N atoms preferentially saturate water-domain surfaces, creating disordered bilayer-like nano-domains that resist macroscopic demixing and generate long-range domain oscillations responsible for pre-peaks in structure factors. Key contributions include linking real-space pair correlations to reciprocal-space pre-peaks, demonstrating strong model dependence (with CHARMM-AA/SPC/E offering a good compromise), and connecting micro-heterogeneity to LCST-type behavior. The findings provide a mechanistic framework for interpreting X-ray scattering in soft-matter mixtures and offer general insight into how surface-binding stabilizes nano-domains, with potential relevance to other micro-emulsion and phase-separating systems.
Abstract
Aqueous alkylamine mixtures are studied by computer simulations in order to understand the microscopic origin of the water rich side prominent x-ray scattering pre-peaks reported in a recent study. These pre-peaks are puzzling in view of the apparently contradicting facts that neat amines show pre-peaks much weaker than neat alkanols, while water-rich aqueous alcohols do not. These observations can be intuitively rationalized by noting that the amine head group have two hydrogen atoms when the hydroxyl group have only one, but they oppose the following two facts: i) computer simulations show micro-heterogeneity for both systems; ii) amines mix with water better than alcohols, both over larger concentrations and alkyl tails lengths. The study of the atom-atom pair correlation functions and related structure factors allows to understand the microscopic molecular details. The most interesting observation is that the amine head groups accumulate preferentially at the surface of the water domains, and increasingly better with longer alkyl tail, thus allowing to stabilize both the water and alkylamine domains, hence avoiding macroscopic demixing, except at high water concentrations when amines are scarce to achieve efficient surface saturation. The amine domains appear as disordered bilayers. Hence, aqueous amines are analogous to an inverse micelle melt and as precursor micro-emulsion. This stable micro-segregation produces large domain oscillations in the long range part of the correlation functions, translating into positive pre-peaks and negative anti-peaks in the related structure factors, the latter which contribute destructively to produce the prominent scattering pre-peak observed in the x-ray experiments. The model dependence is shown to be quite important, both for water and solute models. The CHARMM-AA model associated with the SPC/E model seems to be a good compromise.