Entropy of the liquid-vapour mixture of a thermo-capillary fluid (Q1805340)

This paper considers a thermocapillary van der Waals fluid where two stable phases (liquid and vapour) are separated by a spinodal (unstable) zone. The contribution of capillarity to the internal energy and the viscosity accounting for stability are both taken into account. The equation of state describing the mixture is studied by means of an asymptotic expansion, whose stability depends on the viscosity in spite that the mixture model itself does not depend on it. Most of the paper is devoted to one-dimensional systems. The last section is devoted to multidimensional problems. The entropy of mixing is seen to depend on the dimension of the system. One of the original points in the work is that it does not make any a priori hypothesis concerning the spatial arrangement of the two phases, which are distributed in such a way to minimize the disorder.