Effect of van der Waals forces on the location of the critical point of a model molten salt

A mixture of charged hard spheres (restricted primitive model) with an attractive Yukawa tail added to represent van der Waals forces between the ions is considered as a model of molten salts. The location of the critical point of the gas-liquid phase transition is followed as a function of the strength A of the attractive term. It is found that the critical density increases with increasing A, but that a quantitative agreement between the theoretical results and the available experimental estimates of the critical constants for alkali halides requires the use of an effective dielectric constant greater than unity. © 1985 American Institute of Physics.

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