162t Critical Point of Electrolyte Mixtures

Antti-Pekka Hynninen1, Athanassios Z. Panagiotopoulos1, and Marjolein Dijkstra2. (1) Dept. of Chemical Engineering and PRISM, Princeton University, Engineering Quadrangle, Princeton, NJ 08544, (2) Soft Condensed Matter Group, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands

The critical behavior of electrolyte mixtures is studied using grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations. Mixtures consist of large multivalent macroions and small monovalent co- and counterions. The system can be viewed as a binary mixture of macroions (with their counterions) and salt (co- and counterion pair). The primitive model description is used, in which the ions are point-charges with a hard core and the solvent is treated as an uniform dielectric continuum. The grand canonical simulations are based on insertions and removals of neutral molecules: macroion with its counterions or coion and a counterion. We propose a distance biasing method that enables direct grand canonical simulations up to charge asymmetry 10:1. We calculate the critical loci that connects the salt-free state, which consists of only macroions and counterions, with the pure salt state using mixed-field finite-size scaling with no pressure mixing. The critical parameters are determined for macroion to counterion charge-asymmetries of 2:1, 3:1 and 10:1. Our results suggest that binary electrolyte mixtures are type-I mixtures, where the two-components mix continuously.

[1] A.-P. Hynninen, M. Dijkstra, and A. Z. Panagiotopoulos, J. Chem. Phys. 123, 084903 (2005).