Cavitation formation around and on propellers of submarines affects propulsive efficiency, can cause blade damage, and influences the wake signature. Therefore, understanding the effect surfactants have on the structure of water bubbles and how the surfactant enrichment changes with varying interfaces is important for naval research. Here, we propose the study of surfactants adsorbing onto different liquid/vapor interfaces of water; we aim to observe how the concentration of surfactant adsorbed at different interfaces of water varies. We leverage Monte Carlo simulations in the <i>NpT</i> osmotic Gibbs ensemble. In our method, we setup four thermodynamically connected simulation boxes; one contains a bubble of water, one contains a film of water, one contains a bulk water phase, and the last contains a vapor reservoir of the surfactant of interest, ethanol. We only allow the ethanol molecules to swap between the four boxes. The water and ethanol molecules are modeled with the TIP4P/2005 and TraPPE-UA force fields, respectively, for computational accuracy.

Probing curvature effects of surfactant adsorbing onto liquid/vapor interfaces of water using Monte Carlo simulations

256th National Meeting (2018)

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