The dense gas-like model of the viscosity for liquid metals

Abstract An advanced model to describe the viscosity for liquid metals is presented by examining the Enskog formula of the viscosity for dense gases with an adoption of the viscous activation picture. The model essentially involves only one adjustable parameter, the activation energy, to the experimental viscosities. It is suggested that the activation energy roughly corresponds to the maximum depth in the attractive part of the pair potential for liquid metals, so that some feature of the pair potential may be speculated by use of the Born–Green formula of the viscosity for liquids with the experimental viscosities and radial distribution functions. The model is applied to ten cases of mono-atomic liquid metals of Cu, Ag, Zn, Cd, Ga, In, Sn, Pb, Sb, and Bi. One finds that the model describes the overall experimental data of the viscosity in a wide range of temperature, and that the speculated pair potentials are in accord with some characteristics of liquid metals. The pair potentials speculated for Cu and Ag are comparable with those derived by some other methods based on the analysis for the solid characters of these elements.