Lattice Boltzmann simulation of mixtures with multicomponent van der Waals equation of state

TL;DR

This paper presents a lattice Boltzmann method for simulating multicomponent mixtures with a van der Waals equation of state, accurately reproducing theoretical phase diagrams for fluids.

Contribution

The authors developed a general lattice Boltzmann framework capable of handling multicomponent and multiphase systems with van der Waals interactions, validated against theoretical phase diagrams.

Findings

Successfully simulated two-component mixtures.

Algorithm works for multiple components beyond two.

Accurately reproduces theoretical phase diagrams.

Abstract

We developed a general framework for simulating multicomponent and multiphase systems using the lattice Boltzmann framework. Despite the fact that there is no restriction on the number of components in principle, in this article we focus an application to two-component mixtures, but we also demonstrate that the algorighm works for larger numbers of components. To validate our algorithm we separately minimized this underlying free energy to generate theoretical phase diagrams for mixtures of fluids with a van der Waals-like free energy. All the theoretical phase diagrams are well recovered by our lattice Boltzmann method.