Toward a Molecular-Based Understanding of High-Temperature Solvation Phenomena in Aqueous Electrolyte Solutions

The theoretical treatment of the solvation phenomenon of simple ions in aqueous solutions has been rather difficult, despite the apparent simplicity of the system. Long-range solvent-screened electrostatic interactions, coupled to the large variation (with state conditions) of the dielectric permittivity of water, give rise to a variety of rather complex solvation phenomena including dielectric saturation, electrostriction, and ion association. Notably, ion solvation in high-temperature/pressure aqueous solutions plays a leading role in hydrothermal chemistry, such as in the natural formation of ore deposits, the corrosion in boilers and reactors, and in high-temperature microbiology. Tremendous effort has been invested in the study of hydrothermal solutions to determine their thermodynamic, transport, and spectroscopic properties with the goal of elucidating the solute-solvent and solute-solute interactions over a wide range of state conditions. It is precisely at these conditions where our understanding and predictive capabilities are most precarious, in part, as a result of the coexistence of processes with two rather different length scales, i.e., short-ranged (solvation) and long-ranged (compressibility-driven) phenomena (Chialvo and Cummings 1994a). The latter feature makes hydrothermal systems extremely challenging to model, unless we are able to isolate the (compressibility-driven) propagation of the density perturbation from the (solvation-related) finite-density perturbation phenomena (Chialvo and Cummings 1995a)