Stability boundaries, percolation threshold, and two phase coexistence for polydisperse fluids of adhesive colloidal particles

Abstract

We study the polydisperse Baxter model of sticky hard spheres (SHS) in the modified Mean Spherical Approximation (mMSA). This closure is known to be the zero-order approximation (C0) of the Percus-Yevick (PY) closure in a density expansion. The simplicity of the closure allows a full analytical study of the model. In particular we study stability boundaries, the percolation threshold, and the gas-liquid coexistence curves. Various possible sub-cases of the model are treated in details. Although the detailed behavior depends upon the particularly chosen case, we find that, in general, polydispersity inhibits instabilities, increases the extent of the non percolating phase, and diminishes the size of the gas-liquid coexistence region. We also consider the first-order improvement of the mMSA (C0) closure (C1) and compare the percolation and gas-liquid boundaries for the one-component system with recent Monte Carlo simulations. Our results provide a qualitative understanding of the effect of polydispersity on SHS models and are expected to shed new light on the applicability of SHS models for colloidal mixtures.

37 pages, 7 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (6)

• Phase diagram of the adhesive hard sphere fluid
• Competition of percolation and phase separation in a fluid of adhesive hard spheres
• Phase diagrams of polydisperse van der Waals fluids
• Analytic solutions for Baxter's model of sticky hard sphere fluids within closures different from the Percus_Yevick approximation
• Structure factors for the simplest solvable model of polydisperse colloidal fluids with surface adhesion
• Pathologies in the sticky limit of hard-sphere-Yukawa models for colloidal fluids. A possible correction

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