Droplets, Bubbles and Confined Water at the Nanoscale: Reaching the Thermodynamic Limit.

Abstract

ConspectusNanoscale confinement profoundly reshapes the physical and chemical behavior of water and gases: transition conditions, phase stability, and kinetics can deviate dramatically from bulk expectations, yet many "macroscopic" relations hold for strikingly small systems. These effects pervade porous materials, atmospheric aerosols, membranes, and electrochemical interfaces. This Account asks when classical capillary laws remain predictive at molecular scales and why they fail. Using molecular dynamics and grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations, we examine phenomena where curvature and interfaces dominate─capillary condensation and evaporation in nanopores, nanodroplet and nanobubble formation and stability, wetting on chemically patterned surfaces, and electrochemically generated bubbles at solid-liquid interfaces. We organize these systems using three descriptors─confinement, surface chemical heterogeneity, and observational time scale─which together determine whether fluctuations self-average into continuum-like behavior. A central conclusion emerges: relations such as Kelvin, Young-Laplace, Henry's Law, and Cassie-Baxter retain predictive power down to aggregates of ∼30 molecules provided features are large enough and observations long enough for interfacial fluctuations to equilibrate. Departures arise as confinement intensifies or measurements probe short windows: line and boundary energies, hydrogen-bond microrugosity, and contact-line pinning introduce terms neglected by the macroscopic approximation. A recurring crossover at 1 to 2 nm delineates the regimes of the behavior: above it, additivity and capillary relations are recovered; below it, mixtures can exceed Cassie additivity, nucleation barriers and hysteresis shrink and merge, and metastable nanobubbles give way to transient, oscillating gas clusters. Within nanopores, hysteresis narrows with confinement and can be minimized by deliberate chemical patterning that partitions a single nucleation barrier into staged steps, sharpening reversibility without shifting the equilibrium condensation pressure. On chemically patterned surfaces, Cassie-Baxter additivity fails when heterogeneity is molecular-sized and recovers as features coarsen toward the crossover scale. For surface nanobubbles, hydrophobic binding patches larger than ∼2 nm sustain metastable states whose growth and dissolution follow macroscopic relations, whereas smaller or more curved sites erase the metastable minimum. Under electrochemical driving that produces gases, electrode-bound bubbles reach stationary nonequilibrium states and can transition to nonstationary cycling of nucleation-growth-release when gas generation outpaces dissolution; the onset and bounds of these regimes are captured by simple capillary balances. Together, these results delineate the boundary of predictiveness of capillary thermodynamics and sharpen a picture in which length scale, surface heterogeneity, and observational time scale jointly govern the emergence─or breakdown─of continuum behavior. This boundary organizes the phenomenology of fluids across droplets, pores, patterned substrates, and nanobubbles. This Account provides the conceptual framework for specialists and nonspecialists alike to determine when continuum behavior will hold and when finite-size terms dominate by considering the geometry, heterogeneity length scale, and observation time of these systems.