Thermodynamic pair potential

To make things simpler, let us abbreviate the effective thermodynamic pair potential by V and the separation between the macroions m and n, Xmn, by X. Let us also assume that the macroions m and n have the same charge Z. Then, abbreviating the constant (4 ne2 e) by b, we have... 

Quite recently, Pini et al. [56] have reported a new, thermodynamically self-consistent approximation to the OZ relation for a fluid of spherical particles for a pair potential given by a hard-core repulsion and a Yukawa attractive tail (Eq. (6)). The closure to the OZ equation they have proposed has the form... 

The crucial question is at what value of <)> is the attraction high enough to induce phase separation De Hek and Vrij (6) assume that the critical flocculation concentration is equivalent to the phase separation condition defined by the spinodal point. From the pair potential between two hard spheres in a polymer solution they calculate the second virial coefficient B2 for the particles, and derive from the spinodal condition that if B2 = 1/2 (where is the volume fraction of particles in the dispersion) phase separation occurs. For a system in thermodynamic equilibrium, two phases coexist if the chemical potential of the hard spheres is the same in the dispersion and in the floe phase (i.e., the binodal condition). 

Thermodynamic Equation of State for Classical Fluid Mixtures of Molecules Interacting with Alpha-exponential-six Pair Potentials up to High Densities. 

In order to utilise our colloids as near hard spheres in terms of the thermodynamics we need to account for the presence of the medium and the species it contains. If the ions and molecules intervening between a pair of colloidal particles are small relative to the colloidal species we can treat the medium as a continuum. The role of the molecules and ions can be allowed for by the use of pair potentials between particles. These can be determined so as to include the role of the solution species as an energy of interaction with distance. The limit of the medium forms the boundary of the system and so determines its volume. We can consider the thermodynamic properties of the colloidal system as those in excess of the solvent. The pressure exerted by the colloidal species is now that in excess of the solvent, and is the osmotic pressure II of the colloid. These ideas form the basis of pseudo one-component thermodynamics. This allows us to calculate an elastic rheological property. Let us consider some important thermodynamic quantities for the system. We may apply the first law of thermodynamics to the system. The work done in an osmotic pressure and volume experiment on the colloidal system is related to the excess heat adsorbed d Q and the internal energy change d E ... 

An analogy may be drawn between the phase behavior of weakly attractive monodisperse dispersions and that of conventional molecular systems provided coalescence and Ostwald ripening do not occur. The similarity arises from the common form of the pair potential, whose dominant feature in both cases is the presence of a shallow minimum. The equilibrium statistical mechanics of such systems have been extensively explored. As previously explained, the primary difficulty in predicting equilibrium phase behavior lies in the many-body interactions intrinsic to any condensed phase. Fortunately, the synthesis of several methods (integral equation approaches, perturbation theories, virial expansions, and computer simulations) now provides accurate predictions of thermodynamic properties and phase behavior of dense molecular fluids or colloidal fluids [1]. 

Equation (4.70) is a starting point in the determination of diffusivities in liquid metal alloys, but in most real systems, experimental values are difficult to obtain to confirm theoretical expressions, and pair potentials and molecular interactions that exist in liquid alloys are not sufficiently quantified. Even semiempirical approaches do not fare well when applied to liquid alloy systems. There have been some attempts to correlate diffusivities with thermodynamic quantities such as partial molar enthalpy and free energy of solution, but their application has been limited to only a few systems. 

In principle, the expressions for pair potentials, osmotic pressure and second virial coefficients could be used as input parameters in computer simulations. The objective of performing such simulations is to clarify physical mechanisms and to provide a deeper insight into phenomena of interest, especially under those conditions where structural or thermodynamic parameters of the studied system cannot be accessed easily by experiment. The nature of the intermolecular forces responsible for protein self-assembly and phase behaviour under variation of solution conditions, including temperature, pH and ionic strength, has been explored using this kind of modelling approach (Dickinson and Krishna, 2001 Rosch and Errington, 2007 Blanch et al., 2002). 

The integral equation theory consists in obtaining the pair correlation function g(r) by solving the set of equations formed by (1) the Omstein-Zernike equation (OZ) (21) and (2) a closure relation [76, 80] that involves the effective pair potential weff(r). Once the pair correlation function is obtained, some thermodynamic properties then may be calculated. When the three-body forces are explicitly taken into account, the excess internal energy and the virial pressure, previously defined by Eqs. (4) and (5) have to be, extended respectively [112, 119] so that... 

Pair Potentials and Modelling of Spectroscopic, Collisional, and Thermodynamic Properties of Binary Complexes... 

Assume now that we are in the position to be able to calculate reliable pair potentials. The next task is to employ some statistical thermodynamic model which would permit us to pass from the pair complexes solvent-solute and solvent-solvent to a real liquid, A theoretical analysis of this problem is beyond the scope of this book, so that we restrict ourselves to stating that, in the conjucticn with ab initio calculations, the most sophisticated approach appears to be the statistical mechanics computer simulation of the finite system of N molecules in the volume V at the temperature T. The essence of the... 

The theory of empirical pair potentials is that since they are derived from observations they will incorporate the dominant thermodynamic effects without explicitly having to partition and quantify the effects. Empirical pair potentials have been widely used in protein structure prediction, particularly in fold recognition following their introduction by Sippl [13] and their use... 

The fundamental problem in classical equilibrium statistical mechanics is to evaluate the partition function. Once this is done, we can calculate all the thermodynamic quantities, as these are typically first and second partial derivatives of the partition function. Except for very simple model systems, this is an unsolved problem. In the theory of gases and liquids, the partition function is rarely mentioned. The reason for this is that the evaluation of the partition function can be replaced by the evaluation of the grand canonical correlation functions. Using this approach, and the assumption that the potential energy of the system can be written as a sum of pair potentials, the evaluation of the partition function is equivalent to the calculation of... 

As we mentioned in the opening paragraph, thermodynamic perturbation theory has been used in two contexts in applications to interaction site fluids. In this section, we will describe efforts to treat the thermodynamics and structure of interaction site fluids in terms of a perturbation expansion where the reference system is a fluid in which the intermolecular forces are spherically symmetric. In developing thermodynamic perturbation theories, it is generally necessary to choose both a reference system and a function for describing the path between the reference fluid and the fluid of interest. The latter choice is usually made between the pair potential and its Boltzmann factor. Thus one writes either... 

---