Entropic selectivity of binary mixtures in cylindrical pores.
We show that a simple model consisting of a binary hard-sphere mixture in a narrow cylindrical pore can lead to strong size selectivity by considering a situation where each species of the mixture sees a different radius of the cylinder. Two mechanisms are proposed to explain the observed results depending on the radius of the cylinder: for large radii the selectivity is driven by an enhancement of the depletion forces at the cylinder walls whereas for the narrowest cylinders excluded-volume effects lead to a shift of the effective chemical potential of the particles in the pore.
Departamento de Física Aplicada, Universidad de Salamanca, E-37008 Salamanca, Spain.
A
A
González
J A
JA
White
F L
FL
Román
S
S
Velasco