Energy Effects on the Structure and Thermodynamic Properties of Nanoconfined Fluids (A Density Functional Theory Study)

The structure and properties of fluids confined in nanopores may show a dramatic departure from macroscopic bulk fluids. The main reason for this difference lies in the influence of system walls. In addition to the entropic wall effect, system walls can significantly change the energy of the confined fluid compared to macroscopic bulk fluids. The energy effect of the walls on a nanoconfined fluid appears in two forms. The first effect is the cutting off of the intermolecular interactions by the walls, which appears for example in the integrals for calculation of the thermodynamic properties. The second wall effect involves the wall-molecule interactions. In such confined fluids, the introduction of wall forces and the competition between fluid-wall and fluid-fluid forces could lead to interesting thermodynamic properties, including new kinds of phase transitions not observed in the macroscopic fluid systems. In this article, we use the perturbative fundamental measure density functional theory to study energy effects on the structure and properties of a hard core two-Yukawa fluid confined in a nanoslit. Our results show the changes undergone by the structure and phase transition of the nanoconfined fluids as a result of energy effects.