On the vapor-liquid equilibrium of attractive chain fluids with variable degree of molecular flexibility

We study the isotropic (vapor and liquid) phase behavior of attractive chain fluids. Special emphasis is placed on the role of molecular flexibility, which is studied by means of a rod-coil model. Two new equations of state (EoSs) are developed for square-well- (SW) and Lennard-Jones (LJ) chain fluids. The EoSs are developed by applying the perturbation theory of Barker and Henderson (BH) to a reference fluid of hard chain molecules. The novelty of the approach is based on (1) the use of a recently developed hard-chain reference EoS that explicitly incorporates the effects of molecular flexibility, (2) the use of recent molecular simulation data for the radial distribution function of hard-chain fluids, and (3) a newly developed effective segment size, which effectively accounts for the soft repulsion between segments of LJ chains. It is shown that the effective segment size needs to be temperature-, density-, and chain-length dependent. To obtain a simplified analytical EoS, the perturbation terms are fitted by polynomials in density (SW and LJ), chain length (SW and LJ), and temperature (only for LJ). It is shown that the equations of state result in an accurate description of molecular simulation data for vapor-liquid equilibria (VLE) and isotherms of fully flexible SW- and LJ chain fluids and their mixtures. To evaluate the performance of the equations of state in describing the effects of molecular flexibility on VLE, we present new Monte Carlo simulation results for the VLE of rigid linear- and partially flexible SW- and LJ chain fluids. For SW chains, the developed EoS is in a good agreement with simulation results. For increased rigidity of the chains, both theory and simulations predict an increase of the VL density difference and a slight increase of the VL critical temperature. For LJ chains, the EoS proves incapable of reproducing part of these trends