Molecular Simulations for Understanding the Stabilization of Fullerenes in Water

Volume 12, Issue 1 (January 2021), pp. 39–48

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@article{jocse-12-1-6,
  author={Kendra Noneman and Christopher Muhich and Kevin Ausman and Mike Henry and Eric Jankowski},
  title={Molecular Simulations for Understanding the Stabilization of Fullerenes in Water},
  journal={The Journal of Computational Science Education},
  year=2021,
  month=jan,
  volume=12,
  issue=1,
  pages={39--48},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.22369/issn.2153-4136/12/1/6}
}

Making materials out of buckminsterfullerene is challenging, because it requires first dispersing the molecules in a solvent, and then getting the molecules to assemble in the desired arrangements. In this computational work, we focus on the dispersion challenge: How can we conveniently solubilize buckminsterfullerene? Water is a desirable solvent because of its ubiquity and biocompatibility, but its polarity makes the dispersion of nonpolar fullerenes challenging. We perform molecular dynamics simulations of fullerenes in the presence of fullerene oxides in implicit water to elucidate the role of interactions (van der Waals and Coulombic) on the self-assembly and structure of these aqueous mixtures. Seven coarse-grained fullerene models are characterized over a range of temperatures and interaction strengths using HOOMD-Blue on high performance computing clusters. We find that dispersions of fullerenes stabilized by fullerene oxides are observable in models where the net attraction among fullerenes is about 1.5 times larger than the attractions between oxide molecules. We demonstrate that simplified models are sufficient for qualitatively modeling micellization of these fullerenes and provide an efficient starting point for investigating how structural details and phase behavior depend upon the inclusion of more detailed physics.