Study of ion partitioning in nanoporous materials by analytical approach and molecular modeling

Physical and chemical processes that occur in nano-confined aqueous solutions, particularly the role of “solute-interface” and “solute-solute” interactions within nanopores, are the source of filtration selectivity and require further investigation. The goal is to clarify the validity of different approximations based on the macroscopic mean field approach by comparing them with computational techniques such as Monte Carlo (GCMC) and classical molecular dynamics (MD). These techniques are used to study the distribution of ions at the water/nanopore interface. At the molecular scale, the results show that the distribution of ions depends on their size, polarizability and the structure of water when it is explicitly added to the model, which cannot be reproduced by the primitive model using the GCMC and the mean field approach based on the Poisson–Boltzmann equation.