  Much of the understanding of bulk liquids has progressed through study of the
limiting case in which molecules interact via purely repulsive forces, such as
a hard-core potential. In the same spirit, we report progress on the
understanding of confined water by examining the behavior of water-like
molecules interacting with planar walls via purely repulsive forces and compare
our results with those obtained for Lennard-Jones (LJ) interactions between the
molecules and the walls. Specifically, we perform molecular dynamics
simulations of 512 water-like molecules which are confined between two smooth
planar walls that are separated by 1.1 nm. At this separation, there are either
two or three molecular layers of water, depending on density. We study two
different forms of repulsive confinements, when the interaction potential
between water-wall is (i) $1/r^9$ and (ii) WCA-like repulsive potential. We
find that the thermodynamic, dynamic and structural properties of the liquid in
purely repulsive confinements qualitatively match those for a system with a
pure LJ attraction to the wall. In previous studies that include attractions,
freezing into monolayer or trilayer ice was seen for this wall separation.
Using the same separation as these previous studies, we find that the crystal
state is not stable with $1/r^9$ repulsive walls but is stable with WCA-like
repulsive confinement. However, by carefully adjusting the separation of the
plates with $1/r^9$ repulsive interactions so that the effective space
available to the molecules is the same as that for LJ confinement, we find that
the same crystal phases are stable. This result emphasizes the importance of
comparing systems only using the same effective confinement, which may differ
from the geometric separation of the confining surfaces.
