Extension of the Steele 10-4-3 potential for adsorption calculations in cylindrical, spherical, and other pore geometries

Simplified fluid-substrate interaction models derived from the Lennard-Jones potential are widely used in the simulation of gas physisorption phenomena. In this paper, we reinterpret the well known Steele 10-4-3 potential for a gas molecule interacting with a planar surface, and use the resultant scheme to derive new potentials for cylindrical and spherical pore geometries. These new potentials correctly recover the Steele result in the limit of infinite pore radius, a useful improvement over existing models. We demonstrate the new cylindrical Steele 10-4-3 potential in calculations of argon adsorption via fluid density functional theory. This potential yields markedly different adsorption behavior than existing cylindrical potentials, which follow from small but significant differences in both the strength and the shape of the fluid-surface interaction. These differences cannot be fully reconciled simply by reparameterizing (scaling) the existing models; the new potential is more realistic in design, and is especially to be preferred in studies where comparison with planar substrates is made. Finally, we discuss extensions of this approach to more complicated pore geometries, yielding a family of Steele-like potentials that all satisfy the correct planar limit. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3626804]