Saturated Sodium Chloride Solution under an External Static Electric Field: a Molecular Dynamics Study

The behavior of saturated aqueous sodium chloride solutions under a constant external electric field (E) was studied by molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. Our dynamic MD simulations have indicated that the irreversible nucleation process towards crystallization is accelerated by a moderate E, but retarded or even prohibited under a stronger E, which can be understood by the competition between self-diffusion and drift motion. The former increases with E resulting in the acceleration of the nucleation process, and the latter tears oppositely charged ions more apart under a stronger E leading to the deceleration of nucleation. Moreover, our steady-state MD simulations have indicated that a first-order phase transition happens in saturated solutions only when the applied E is below a certain threshold Ec, and the ratio of crystallized ions does not change with the electric field. The magnitude of Ec increases with concentration, because larger clusters are easy to form in a more concentrated solution and require a stronger E to dissociate them.