Ion aggregation in high salt solutions. V. Graph entropy analyses of ion aggregate structure and water hydrogen bonding network

Dissolved ions in water tend to form polydisperse ion aggregates such as ion pairs, relatively compact ion clusters, and even spatially extended ion networks with increasing salt concentration. Combining molecular dynamics simulation and graph theoretical analysis methods, we recently studied morphological structures of ion aggregates with distinctively different characteristics. They can be distinguished from each other by calculating various spectral graph theoretical properties such as eigenvalues and eigenvectors of adjacency matrices of ion aggregates and water hydrogen-bonding networks, minimum path lengths, clustering coefficients, and degree distributions. Here, we focus on percolation and graph entropic properties of ion aggregates and water hydrogen-bonding networks in high salt solutions. Ion network-forming K⁺ and SCN^- ions at high concentrations show a percolating behavior in their aqueous solutions, but ion cluster-forming ions in NaCl solutions do not show such a transition from isolated ion aggregates to percolating ion-water mixture morphology. Despite that the ion aggregate structures are strikingly different for either cluster- or network-forming ions in high salt solutions, it is interesting that the water structures remain insensitive to the electrostatic properties, such as charge densities and polydentate properties, of dissolved ions, and morphological structures of water H-bonding networks appear to be highly robust regardless of the nature and concentration of salt. We anticipate that the present graph entropy analysis results would be of use in understanding a variety of anomalous behaviors of interfacial water around biomolecules as well as electric conductivities of high electrolyte solutions.