Hydrophilic and Hydrophobic Effects on the Structure and Themodynamic Properties of Confined Water: Water in Solutions

NMR spectroscopy is used in the temperature range 180–350 K to study the local order and transport properties of pure liquid water (bulk and confined) and its solutions with glycerol and methanol at different molar fractions. We focused our interest on the hydrophobic effects (HE), i.e., the competition between hydrophilic and hydrophobic interactions. Nowadays, compared to hydrophilicity, little is known about hydrophobicity. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to gain new information about hydrophobicity. As the liquid water properties are dominated by polymorphism (two coexisting liquid phases of high and low density) due to hydrogen bond interactions (HB), creating (especially in the supercooled regime) the tetrahedral networking, we focused our interest to the HE of these structures. We measured the relaxation times (<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>T</mi><mn>1</mn></msub>emantics></math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mi>T</mi><mn>2</mn></msub>emantics></math></inline-formula>) and the self-diffusion (D<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mrow></mrow><mi>S</mi></msub>emantics></math></inline-formula>). From these times, we took advantage of the NMR property to follow the behaviors of each molecular component (the hydrophilic and hydrophobic groups) separately. In contrast, D<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mrow></mrow><mi>S</mi></msub>emantics></math></inline-formula> is studied in terms of the Adam–Gibbs model by obtaining the configurational entropy (S<inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><msub><mrow></mrow><mrow><mi>c</mi><mi>o</mi><mi>n</mi><mi>f</mi></mrow></msub>emantics></math></inline-formu