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We report direct Monte Carlo (MC) simulations on the liquid-vapor interfaces of pure water, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide. In the case of water, the recent TIP4P/2005 potential model used with the MC method is shown to reproduce the experimental surface tension and to accurately describe the coexistence curves. The agreement with experiments is also excellent for CO(2) and H(2)S with standard nonpolarizable models. The surface tensions are calculated by using the mechanical and the thermodynamic definitions via profiles along the direction normal to the surface. We also discuss the different contributions to the surface tension due to the repulsion-dispersion and electrostatic interactions. The different profiles of these contributions are proposed in the case of water.

We use a simple spring-spring repulsion to model entanglements between polymers in dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) simulations. The model is applied to a polymer brushes system to study lubrication. We demonstrate that this method leads to mechanical equilibrium in polymer brushes using the normal DPD time step. The number of bond crossings is calculated to provide a quantitative description of the entanglement. We demonstrate that it is possible to avoid 99% of the bond crossings with the values of spring-spring repulsion that can be used without significantly decreasing the time step. A shear force is applied to the system to study the effect of the decrease in the bond crossings on the structure and rheological properties of the brushes. In particular, we show how the friction coefficient increases with the decrease in the bond crossings of the polymers.

Monte Carlo simulations have been performed to study the interfacial properties of the liquid-vapor interface of alkanes. We highlight the chemical equilibrium of the liquid-vapor interface by calculating a local chemical potential including the appropriate long-range corrections profiles. We extend the "test-area" (TA) technique developed by Gloor [J. Chem. Phys. 123, 134703 (2005)] on Lennard-Jones and square-well fluids to molecular systems. We establish both operational expressions of the TA approach for the calculation of the surface tension profile and the corresponding long-range corrections by underlining the approximations used. We compare the results between the different operational expressions of the surface tension and focus on the truncation procedures to explain the difference between the different techniques using either the potential or force equations. We make the results of surface tension identical between the different methods by using consistent potential and force equations. In the case of a relatively small cutoff, we propose to show that the Irving-Kirkwood definition and TA methods lead to the same value of the surface tension under condition that appropriate long-range corrections be included in the calculation. We end this paper by calculation of the entropy change profile and a comparison with experiments.