McMillan-Mayer Theory of Solutions Revisited: Simplifications and Extensions

Abstract

McMillan and Mayer (MM) proved two remarkable theorems in their paper on the equilibrium statistical mechanics of liquid solutions. They first showed that the grand canonical partition function for a solution can be reduced to a one with an effectively solute-only form, by integrating out the solvent degrees of freedom. The total effective solute potential in the effective solute grand partition function can be decomposed into components which are potentials of mean force for isolated groups of one, two, three, etc, solute molecules. Secondly, from the first result, now assuming low solute concentration, MM derived an expansion for the osmotic pressure in powers of the solute concentration, in complete analogy with the virial expansion of gas pressure in powers of the density at low density. The molecular expressions found for the osmotic virial coefficients have exactly the same form as the corresponding gas virial coefficients, with potentials of mean force replacing vacuum potentials. In this paper we restrict ourselves to binary liquid solutions with solute species $A$ and solvent species $B$ and do three things: (a) By working with a semi-grand canonical ensemble (grand with respect to solvent only) instead of the grand canonical ensemble used by MM, and avoiding graphical methods, we have greatly simplified the derivation of the first MM result,(b) by using a simple nongraphical method developed by van Kampen for gases, we have greatly simplified the derivation of the second MM result,i.e.,the osmotic pressure virial expansion; as a by-product, we show the precise relation between MM theory and Widom potential distribution theory, and (c) we have extended MM theory by deriving virial expansions for other solution properties such as the enthalpy of mixing. The latter expansion, with changed independent variables corresponding to current experiments, is proving useful.