Modeling the thermal conductivity of n-alkanes via the use of density scaling

It has been well established that certain dynamical quantities such as the dielectric relaxation times and the viscosity of liquids can be graphically represented into a single master curve as a function of the thermodynamic potential (ργ/T), where T is the temperature, ρ is the density, and γ is a state-independent scaling exponent. In this work, we applied the aforementioned thermodynamic scaling to the thermal conductivity of linear alkanes from methane to n-decane. In doing so, a new unreduced yet normalized form of the thermal conductivity was introduced in this work in order to obtain improved correlations of thermal conductivity over much wider temperature and pressure ranges encompassing the zero-density limit, the high-density region, the gas-liquid saturation line and the vicinity of the critical point. A calculation procedure is also described here to optimize the value of the scaling exponent γ that ensures the best super-positioning of all experimental isotherms considered for each hydrocarbon.