| Description |
There remain many unanswered questions regarding the structure and behavior of water, particularly when cooled below the melting temperature into water's supercooled region. In this region, liquid water is metastable, and rapid crystallization makes it difficult to study experimentally the liquid and the crystallization process. Computational studies are hindered by the complexity of accurately modeling water and the computational cost of simulating processes such as crystallization. In this work, the development and validation of mW, a monatomic water model, is presented. This model is able to quantitatively reproduce the structure, dynamic anomalies and phase behavior of water without hydrogen atoms or electrostatics by reproducing water's propensity to form locally tetrahedral structures. Using the mW water model in molecular dynamics simulations, we show the evolution of the local structure of water from 300 - 100 K. We find that the thermodynamic and structural properties studied, density, tetrahedrality and structural correlation length, change maximally or are maximum at 202 ± 2 K, the liquid-liquid transformation temperature. Shifting to water confined within cylindrical nanopores, we present the development of a rotationally invariant method, the CHILL algorithm, to distinguish between liquid, hexagonal and cubic ice. We analyze the process of homogeneous nucleation, growth and melting within hydrophilic pores, as well as the effect of water-pore interaction strength on the melting of ice and liquid-ice coexistence within pores. |
