title: The onset of calcium carbonate nucleation: a density functional theory molecular dynamics and hybrid microsolvation/continuum study.
abstract: Density functional theory (Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof) based methods have been used to study the structure and hydration environment of the building blocks of CaCO 3 in aqueous solutions of calcium bicarbonate and calcium carbonate. Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics simulations of Ca(2+)/CO3(2-) and Ca (2+)/HCO3(-) in explicit water were performed to investigate the formation of CaCO3 and the hydration shell of the solvated hetero-ion pair. Our simulations show that the formation of the monomer of CaCO3 occurs with an associative mechanism and that the dominant building block of calcium (bi)carbonate in aqueous solution is Ca[eta(1)-(H)CO3](H2O)5, i.e., the preferred hydration number is five, while the (bi)carbonate is coordinated to the calcium in a monodentate mode. This result agrees with static calculations, where a hybrid approach using a combination of explicit solvent molecules and a polarizable continuum model has been applied to compute the solvation free energies of calcium bicarbonate species. Furthermore, the discrete-continuum calculations predict that the Ca(HCO3)2 and Ca(HCO3)3(-) species are stable in an aqueous environment preferentially as Ca(HCO3)2(H2O)4 and Ca(HCO3)3(H2O)2(-), respectively.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Christopher Ingold Laboratories, University College London, 20 Gordon Street, London, United Kingdom. uccaddi@ucl.ac.uk
authors.forename: Devis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Di Tommaso
authors.forename: Nora H
authors.initials: NH
authors.lastname: de Leeuw
mesh_terms: D002119:Calcium Carbonate / Q000737:chemistry*; D008958:Models, Molecular; D012997:Solvents / Q000737:chemistry*
chemical_list: D012997:Solvents; D002119:Calcium Carbonate