Phase coexistence and critical point determination in polydisperse fluids

Abstract

Phase equilibria of fluids with variable size polydispersity have been investigated by means of Monte Carlo simulations. In the models, spherical particles of different additive diameters interact through Lennard-Jones and hard sphere Yukawa intermolecular potentials and the underlying distribution of particle sizes is a Gaussian. The Gibbs ensemble Monte Carlo technique has been applied to determine the phase coexistence far below the critical temperature. Critical points have been estimated by finite-size scaling analysis using histogram reweighting for NpT simulation data. In order to achieve efficient sampling in the vicinity of the critical points, the hyper-parallel tempering scheme has been utilized.