Evaluating virial coefficients for multicomponent mixtures: hard sphere mixtures and flexible chains

A new algorithm to compute the virial coefficients of multicomponent mixtures is proposed. The number of graphs that must be evaluated increases dramatically in a multicomponent mixture so that it becomes difficult to enumerate and compute all possible graphs. However, once all of them are known and evaluated, the virial coefficient of the mixture can be evaluated for any composition. If one is interested in the virial coefficient of a mixture of a certain composition, then a simpler approach can be followed. Starting from the graphs of a pure fluid, we assign a random chemical identity to each of the molecules of the graph. The probability of assigning a given chemical identity is taken from the composition of the mixture. In this way composition is treated as a random variable within the Monte Carlo procedure which determines the virial coefficient. The algorithm is checked by comparison with the virial coefficients of binary hard spheres mixtures which are well known. Good agreement is found. The procedure is then extended to multicomponent mixtures of hard spheres. Finally the procedure is applied to the determination of the virial coefficients of a flexible molecule. For flexible molecules the possible configurations of the molecules are treated as different components of the mixture. In this way we present what appears to be the first determination of the third and fourth virial coefficients of polymers in the continuum.