Liquid-vapor transition, ionic fluid criticality

While the early work on molten NH4CI gave only some qualitative hints that the effective critical behavior of ionic fluids may be different from that of nonionic fluids, the possibility of apparent mean-field behavior has been substantiated in precise studies of two- and multicomponent ionic fluids. Crossover to mean-field criticality far away from Tc seems now well-established for several systems. Examples are liquid-liquid demixings in binary systems such as Bu4NPic + alcohols and Na + NH3, liquid-liquid demixings in ternary systems of the type salt + water + organic solvent, and liquid-vapor transitions in aqueous solutions of NaCl. On the other hand, Pitzer s conjecture that the asymptotic behavior itself might be mean-field-like has not been confirmed. 

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