Abstract:

Compressibility of a fluid in a porous medium determines the response of the medium to mechanical loads, and acoustic waves propagation in particular. If the pores of the medium are in the nanometer range, many thermodynamic properties of the fluid confined in such pores are altered. In this talk I will show that the fluid compressibility is not an exception.

I will discuss two different approaches for calculation of compressibility of a fluid in nanopore based on Monte Carlo molecular simulations, illustrating them with an example for argon [1]. The results of the simulations show that the predictions of the two approaches are consistent and agree well with the compressibility of confined argon calculated from ultrasonic experiments on argon-saturated nanoporous glass [2]. Molecular simulations for a range of pore sizes provide a simple relation between the compressibility of the confined fluid and the size of the confining pore.

[1] Dobrzanski, C.D.; Maximov, M.A. and Gor, G.Y.; J. Chem. Phys., 2018, 148(5), 054503.

[2] Gor, G.Y. and Gurevich, B.; Geophys. Res. Lett, 2018, 45(1), 146-155.

Biographical sketch:

Gennady Gor received Ph.D. in theoretical physics from St. Petersburg State University, Russia in 2009. He continued his postdoctoral research in the United States, at Rutgers University, Princeton University and Naval Research Laboratory. In 2016 he joined Chemical and Materials Engineering department at NJIT as an assistant professor. Dr. Gor's Computational Laboratory for Porous Materials employs a set of modeling techniques, such as Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations, density functional theory and finite element methods, to study materials ranging from nanoporous adsorbents to macroporous polymers and geological porous media.