Predicting the viscosity of n-alkane liquid mixtures based on molecular description

•A new model has been developed to predict the viscosity of liquid mixtures.•The mixture is represented by a single pseudo-component.•The characterization is by an appropriate molecular weight.•The model was validated using data on n-alkane mixtures.•It is a first step in dealing with industrial fluids of ill-defined composition.

A new model has been developed to predict the viscosity of liquid, n-alkane mixtures. It represents a mixture by a single pseudo-component characterized by an appropriate molecular weight and calculates the viscosity by means of the modified, extended hard-sphere model (EHS) that makes use of an universal function relating reduced viscosity to reduced volume. For mixtures that contain n-alkanes with a similar number of carbon atoms, the molecular weight of the pseudo-component is simply given by the molecular weight of the mixture. For more asymmetric mixtures, the choice of the molecular weight is a function of the difference in the number of carbon atoms, between the longest and the shortest chain. The proposed model is a precursor of a new family of models that do not require the knowledge of detailed composition of the mixture, but still take advantage of the underlying molecular description. The developed model, named 1-component Extended Hard-Sphere (1-cEHS), predicted, in general, the viscosity of binary and multicomponent n-alkane mixtures with uncertainty of 5%, even when the mixtures contain very long n-alkanes. For highly asymmetric binary mixtures of alkanes the predictions deteriorated, but improved for highly asymmetric multicomponent mixtures indicating that the presence of the intermediate alkane species leads to a better prediction.We have also tested two other viscosity models, the extended hard sphere (EHS) and Vesovic-Wakeham (VW), that also rely on kinetic theory to provide the molecular description, but require a full compositional specification of the mixture. They can also predict the viscosity within 5%, but the presence of the long chain n-alkanes in a mixture as well as the high asymmetry, leads to deterioration of the prediction.