The liquid-vapor interface of the restricted primitive model of ionic fluids from a density functional approach

TL;DR

This paper uses a density functional approach to study the liquid-vapor interface of an ionic fluid model, incorporating electrostatic and associative effects, and compares results with previous theories.

Contribution

It introduces a density functional framework that accounts for electrostatic and ion pairing effects in modeling the ionic fluid interface.

Findings

Density profiles are computed and analyzed.

Surface tension values are obtained and compared.

The approach shows improved agreement with experimental data.

Abstract

We investigate the liquid-vapor interface of the restricted primitive model for an ionic fluid using a density functional approach. The applied theory includes the electrostatic contribution to the free energy functional arising from the bulk energy equation of state and the mean spherical approximation for a restricted primitive model, as well as the associative contribution, due to the formation of pairs of ions. We compare the density profiles and the values of the surface tension with previous theoretical approaches.