Scaled particle theory for a hard spherocylinder fluid in a disordered porous medium: Carnahan-Starling and Parsons-Lee corrections

Abstract

The scaled particle theory (SPT) approximation is applied for the study of the influence of a porous medium on the isotropic-nematic transition in a hard spherocylinder fluid. Two new approaches are developed in order to improve the description in the case of small lengths of spherocylinders. In one of them, the so-called SPT-CS-PL approach, the Carnahan-Starling (CS) correction is introduced to improve the description of thermodynamic properties of the fluid, while the Parsons-Lee (PL) correction is introduced to improve the orientational ordering. The second approach, the so-called SPT-PL approach, is connected with generalization of the PL theory to anisotropic fluids in disordered porous media. The phase diagram is obtained from the bifurcation analysis of a nonlinear integral equation for the singlet distribution function and from the thermodynamic equilibrium conditions. The results obtained are compared with computer simulation data. Both ways and both approaches considerably improve the description in the case of spherocylinder fluids with smaller spherocylinder lengths. We did not find any significant differences between the results of the two developed approaches. We found that the bifurcation analysis slightly overestimates and the thermodynamical analysis underestimates the predictions of the computer simulation data. A porous medium shifts the phase diagram to smaller densities of the fluid and does not change the type of the transition.