Hydrophobic hydration at the level of primitive models. II: Large solutes and water restructuring

Details of structural changes that take place in water near an apolar solute have been studied by Monte Carlo simulations for hard sphere solutes of increasing size, including the limiting case of water at a hard structureless wall. Water has been modelled by two different types of extended primitive model, the four-site EPM4 model and five-site EPM5 model. Two different patterns of the orientational ordering of the water molecules around the solute as a function of its size have been found. For the EPM5 model, the structure of water and the orientation of its molecules near an apolar solute of finite diameter do not seem to be sensitive to the size of the solute, and only become more pronounced when the solute becomes a hard wall. On the other hand, the orientation ordering of the EPM4 molecules gradually changes with increasing size of the solute, and for solutes larger than approximately five times the size of the water molecule it is opposite to that near a small solute. A novel method to evaluate the excess chemical potential of large solutes has been implemented, and some thermodynamic quantities for water (distribution of hydrogen bonds and the excess chemical potential) have been computed as a function of the distance from the solute.