ABSTRACT
The prediction of properties in porous materials is of continuing interest in the fields of chemical and materials engineering. Application areas include (i) the use of supercritical fluids to synthesize porous materials [1-4], (ii) physical adsorption of trace components from gaseous effluents, (iii) gas storage using microporous materials [5], and (iv) chemical separations using inorganic membranes [6]. Given this situation, there has been substantial effort over the years devoted to developing equations of state suitable for thermodynamic property predictions in fluids confined in porous media. However, developing tractable physically based models has remained elusive [7]. An important class of these
equations of state is of the mean-field type, which are of interest because they are often analytic and therefore amenable for use in process engineering calculations [8]. Two important questions arise in the context of such equations of state: (i) How accurate are they for real fluids, and (ii) can the number of adjustable parameters required for their use be kept to a minimum? The main purpose in this chapter tutorial is to describe a mean-field statistical mechanical approach for developing equations of state for predicting the properties of confined fluids, including their critical properties, which can be quite different from their bulk fluid counterparts.
