Experimental microgravity Soret Coefficients in multicomponent systems: towards mixing rules?
Abstract
Soret effect in multicomponent system (more than 2 components) are being studied starting from binary solutions. Possible predictive theories are extensions of the thermodynamic theories, molecular dynamics, but also by the mechanical statistics extensions. The latter are illustrated at the light of the experiments obtained in microgravity conditions. For binary melts, a very good concordance between measurements on samples processed in microgravity and the statistical theory is obtained under the form of thermodiffusion factors as function of mass misfit. The same approach is used for hydrocarbon ternary and quaternary solution processed in microgravity in the SCCO experiment.