Transport coefficients of multi-component mixtures of noble gases based on ab initio potentials. Viscosity and thermal conductivity

TL;DR

This paper computes the viscosity and thermal conductivity of noble gas mixtures using ab initio potentials and Chapman-Enskog method, achieving high accuracy and improving upon previous results across various compositions and temperatures.

Contribution

It introduces a highly accurate ab initio approach for calculating transport coefficients of noble gas mixtures, surpassing previous methods in precision.

Findings

Viscosity and thermal conductivity calculations have errors below 1e-6 and 1e-5.

The interatomic potential uncertainty is approximately 0.1%.

Results show significant accuracy improvements over existing literature.

Abstract

The viscosity and thermal conductivity of binary, ternary and quaternary mixtures of helium, neon, argon, and krypton at low density are computed for wide ranges of temperature and molar fractions, applying the Chapman-Enskog method. Ab initio interatomic potentials are employed in order to calculate the omega-integrals. The relative numerical errors of the viscosity and thermal conductivity do not exceed 1.e-6 and 1.e-5, respectively. The relative uncertainty related to the interatomic potential is about 0.1%. A comparison of the present data with results reported in other papers available in the literature shows a significant improvement of accuracy of the transport coefficients considered here.