States of a dispersed nonwetting liquid in a disordered nanoporous medium

Abstract

Three different states of a dispersed nonwetting liquid (water) in the Fluka 100 C8 and Fluka 100 C18 disordered porous media, as well as transitions between these states under variation of the temperature and the degree of filling, have been revealed. It has been shown that the appearance of such states is due to the broadening of the pore size distribution function f(R), fluctuations of configurations of neighbors in the system of pores and fluctuations in the configuration of a pore and its environment consisting of filled and empty pores in the percolation cluster. These states and transitions are caused by the competition between the effective repulsion of the nonwetting liquid from the wall of the pore, which is responsible for the "extrusion" of the liquid from the pore, and the effective collective "multiparticle" attraction of the liquid cluster in the pore to clusters in the neighboring connected pores. The observed difference in the behavior of the Fluka 100 C8/water and Fluka 100 C18/water systems and the previously studied Libersorb-23 (L23)/water system indicates a significant dependence of the state of these systems on the type of disorder in them.