Stability of the H₂-(He, Ne, Ar) fluid mixtures

A theory of mixtures based on a statistical mechanical perturbation scheme is used to compute the excess free energy of mixing, the excess entropy of mixing and the concentration fluctuations in the long wavelength limit as functions of composition (c) over a wide range of temperature (T = 150 to 350 K) and pressure (p = 10 MPa to 10 GPa). This has been utilized to investigate the effects of c, T and p on the solubility of H2 (the first element of the periodic table) to He, Ne and Ar (the first three elements of the last group) and the thermodynamic stability of the mixture. The long-range correlations among the constituent species are included through the double Yukawa potential which acts as a perturbation to the hard sphere reference mixture. The non-additivity of the potentials of the constituent species is linked to the second virial coefficients which can be determined from the experimental data. Necessary corrections to the equation of state for dimerisation of H2 molecule and quantum effects are included. At a given T = 150 K and p = 100 MPa, H2-Ar mixture exhibits greater thermodynamic stability than H2-Ne and H2-Ar.