Many-fluid Onsager density functional theories for orientational ordering in mixtures of anisotropic hard-body fluids.

The extension of Onsager's second-virial theory [L. Onsager, Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 51, 627 (1949)] for the orientational ordering of hard rods to mixtures of nonspherical hard bodies with finite length-to-breadth ratios is examined using the decoupling approximations of Parsons [Phys. Rev. A 19, 1225 (1979)] and Lee [J. Chem. Phys. 86, 6567 (1987); 89, 7036 (1988)]. Invariably the extension of the Parsons-Lee (PL) theory to mixtures has in the past involved a van der Waals one-fluid treatment in which the properties of the mixture are approximated by those of a reference one-component hard-sphere fluid with an effective diameter which depends on the composition of the mixture and the molecular parameters of the various components; commonly this is achieved by equating the molecular volumes of the effective hard sphere and of the components in the mixture and is referred to as the PL theory of mixtures. It is well known that a one-fluid treatment is not the most appropriate for the description of the thermodynamic properties of isotropic fluids, and inadequacies are often rectified with a many-fluid (MF) theory. Here, we examine MF theories which are developed from the virial theorem and the virial expansion of the Helmholtz free energy of anisotropic fluid mixtures. The use of the decoupling approximation of the pair distribution function at the level of a multicomponent hard-sphere reference system leads to our MF Parsons (MFP) theory of anisotropic mixtures. Alternatively the mapping of the virial coefficients of the hard-body mixtures onto those of equivalent hard-sphere systems leads to our MF Lee (MFL) theory. The description of the isotropic-nematic phase behavior of binary mixtures of hard Gaussian overlap particles is used to assess the adequacy of the four different theories, namely, the original second-virial theory of Onsager, the usual PL one-fluid theory, and the MF theories based on the Lee (MFL) and Parsons (MFP) approaches. A comparison with the simulation data for the mixtures studied by Zhou et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 120, 1832 (2004)] suggests that the Parsons MF description (MFP) provides the most accurate representation of the properties of the isotropic-nematic ordering transition and density (pressure) dependence of the order parameters.