Classical density functional approach to depletion interaction of Lennard-Jones binary mixtures

Abstract

Abstract In this article, we apply classical density functional theory to investigate the characteristics of depletion interaction in Lennard-Jones (LJ) binary fluid mixtures. First of all, in order to confirm the validity of our adopted density functional formalism, we calculate the radial distribution functions with theoretical approach and compare them with results obtained by molecular dynamics simu- lation. Then this approach is applied to the case of two colloids immersed in LJ solvent systems. We investigate the variation of depletion interaction with respect to the distance of two colloids in LJ binary systems. We find that depletion interaction may be attractive or repulsive, mostly depending on the bulk density of solvent and the temperature of binary system. For high bulk densities, the repulsive barrier of depletion force is remarkable when the total excluded volume of colloids touches each other and reaches a maximum. The height of repulsive barrier is related to the parameters of LJ potential and bulk density. Moreover, depletion force may exhibit attractive wells if the bulk density of solvent is low. The attractive well tends to appear when the surface-surface distance of colloids is half of the size of polymer and deepen with temperature lowering in a fixed bulk density. In contrast with the hard-spheres system, no oscillation of depletion potential around zero is observed.