Re: CCL:W:Molecular dynamics of silica in H2O

You should look up the work of SH Garofalini.
He has done extensive SiO2-H2O simulations.
I'm not sure if this force field is suitable for your
purposes, but it is the closest thing I've seen.

At 08:04 AM 6/16/2005, you wrote:
Hello,

I want to start an MD simulation of a silica particle of size 5-10 nm in aequous solution, possibly also with a few Na+ ions floating around. I have a sample PDB file containing the structure of a silica nanoparticle, and have tried to make a box containing the nanoparticle and some water molecules using the 'genbox' utility program of GROMACS.

The problem arises when defining the parameters which determine how the atoms will interact. Does anyone have a good set of general parameters for such a system ? I am aware of the the work of Wensink and Hoffmann [Langmuir 16, 7392 (2000)], but their scheme relies on a partitioning of the system into crystal, surface and water atoms and I do not know how such a partitioning could be done in my case so as to best use their parameterization.

I'm not 100% tied to using GROMACS (any freely available and capable MD code will do for some initial investigations). I would be grateful for any advice on alternatives.

My investigations are intended to look into the behaviour in solution of silica nanoparticles formed by polymerization in solutions of sodium silicates, including nucleation, growth, formation of charged nanoparticles (and consequently double layers) and the effect of solution pH on this process and the detailed effects on nanoparticle surface charge density. The list above is long, I realize, but I would very much appreciate some pointers on how to get started quickly into these investigations.

Many thanks in advance,
Steve Kirk


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