Modelling of critical phenomena: challenging problems

Critical phenomena can leads to promising technologies in many fields such as separation, chemical reaction, material processing, waste treatment, plastic recycling and others. They can provide environmentally friendly and advanced industrial processes with less energy consumption and high efficiency. Supercritical carbon dioxide, water, alcohol were intensively studied because of their unique and suitable solvent properties, safety, small impact on the earth’s environment, and their economic advantages. By employing mixtures of co-solvent/supercritical fluid, one can also use the fluid composition as an additional parameter to fine-tune the properties of processing fluids for a specific application, such as those involved in polymer processing.

Modelling of the critical phenomena is unsolved task of modern physical chemistry. The problems of Kadanoff-Wilson theory, Ornstein-Zernike equation and computer simulations will be discussed in the report. Special attention will be paid for many body correlations of molecules in fluids near the critical point.