A case against large cluster-induced nonequilibrium solvent effects in supercritical water

Using a partially compressible continuum solvation model, we have shown that solvent compression in just the first two solvation shells (or thereabouts) is all that is required to gain the bulk of the compression-induced enhancement to the solvation energy of ions in supercritical water. This result is found to hold even when the direct, equilibrium solvent-solute cluster involves well over a hundred solvent molecules. We argue that, for charge variation reactions in supercritical water, the observed short-range behavior of the compression-induced solvation free energy precludes the existence of any anomalously large nonequilibrium solvent effects which might be expected on the basis of the very large size of the equilibrium clusters. Received: 8 January 1997 / Accepted: 17 January 1997