Self- and mutual diffusion coefficient equation for pure fluids, liquid mixtures and polymeric solutions

Transport properties are important information not only for industrial equipment design but also for many research areas. While there is a well-developed theory for gases at low densities, there is no established theory to calculate diffusion coefficients for dense fluids, especially for polymeric solutions. Recently, a database of 96 self-diffusion coefficient data points were obtained from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations for freely jointed Lennard–Jones chains (LJC) with lengths of 2, 4, 8 and 16 at reduced densities ranging from 0.1 to 0.9 and in the reduced temperature interval of 1.5 to 4. These data were used to develop an equation that correlates MD self-diffusion coefficient points with an overall absolute average deviation of 15.3%. The aim of this work is to show that this equation can be used to calculate diffusivities of pure liquids and liquid mixtures, including polymeric solutions. The proposed equation is used for correlating self-diffusion coefficients for 22 pure real substances and then for predicting mutual diffusion coefficients for 12 binary liquid mixtures. The proposed equation is also used to calculate mutual diffusion coefficients for polymeric systems as: polystyrene–toluene at 110 °C, poly(vinyl acetate)–toluene at 35 °C, and poly(vinyl acetate)–chloroform at 35 and 45 °C. Results show that the model developed here seems to be a promising approach for correlating mutual diffusion coefficients not only for small-molecule systems but also for polymer–solvent systems. One advantage of the equation proposed here is that the parameters have physical meaning and most of them can be estimated without any information on binary diffusion data.