Experimental Virial Coefficient Data Research Articles

The Bender Equation of State and Virial Coefficients

The second and third virial coefficients calculated from the Bender equation of state (BEOS) are tested against experimental virial coefficient data. It is shown that the temperature dependences of the second and third virial coefficients as predicted by the BEOS are sufficiently accurate. We conclude that experimental second virial coefficients should be used to determine independently five of twenty constants of the Bender equation. This would improve the performance of the equation in a region of low-density gas, and also suppress correlations among the BEOS constants, which is even more important. The third virial coefficients cannot be used for the same purpose because of large uncertainties in their experimental values.

Hydrophobic interactions and osmotic second virial coefficients for methanol in water

A recent theory of the hydrophobic effect together with a simple model for an alcohol molecule is used to calculate the osmotic (McMillan-Mayer) second virial coefficientB2 for methanol dissolved in water. We use this calculation to study the validity of common arguments that try to draw microscopic structural information from experimental virial coefficient data. In disagreement with many workers, we find that the hydrophobic interaction between hard spheres in water is attractive and that its strength diminishes as temperature is raised. Models that have come to the opposite conclusions have neglected complications inherent to real solutes such as the role of the hydroxy groups in affecting the correlations between the apolar portions of neighboring alcohols. The calculations reported here indicate that this neglect is a poor approximation for methanol. Our calculations also show that osmotic virial coefficients are sensitive to subtle details in the potentials of mean force. Therefore, slowly varying (e.g., dispersion) interactions may also contribute significantly to the values of these coefficients without significantly changing the solvent structure near the solute molecules.