Reconsidering Calcium Dehydration as the Rate-Determining Step in Calcium Mineral Growth.

The dehydration of cations is generally accepted as the rate-limiting step in many processes. Molecular dynamics (MD) can be used to investigate the dynamics of water molecules around cations, and two different methods exist to obtain trajectory-based water dehydration frequencies. Here, these two different post-processing methods (direct method versus survival function) have been implemented to obtain calcium dehydration frequencies from a series of trajectories obtained using a range of accepted force fields.

Equilibrium and rate constants, and reaction mechanism of the HF dissociation in the HF(H2O)7 cluster by ab initio rare event simulations.

We perform restrained hybrid Monte Carlo (MC) simulations to compute the equilibrium constant of the dissociation reaction of HF in HF(H2O)7. We find that the HF is a stronger acid in the cluster than in the bulk, and its acidity is higher at lower T. The latter phenomenon has a vibrational entropic origin, resulting from a counterintuitive balance of intra- and intermolecular terms.