Good evening,

> On 02.03.2016, at 18:44, Linus Torvalds <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Mar 2, 2016 at 9:25 AM, Dirk Hohndel <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> So since Robert's formula /should/ be the right way to calculate the
>> compensation factors, let's figure out what about it is broken and use
>> "matches the wikipedia data" as a measuring stick for that.

I think (unless my implementation is wrong),this is as good as it gets with a 
two parameter model that is also not particularly tuned to our use case of 
air-like gases at 300K with 1–300bar pressure.

> 
> Well, the thing is, Robert's formula isn't actually physical, it's
> fundamentally an approximation too.
> 
> In fact, it's arguably much less physical than the van der Waals
> equation, that at least tries to model the physical behavior, while
> afaik the Redlich–Kwong equation is _purely_ an empirical
> approximation.
> 
> The first paragraph in the wikipedia page really does sum it up:
> 
>  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlich%E2%80%93Kwong_equation_of_state
> 
> so to some degree, Lubomirs least-square polynomial would actually be
> superior: it is the same kind of approximation, but it's an
> approximation that has been specialized for one particular gas and
> pressure/temperature range we happen to care about.
> 
> The Redlich–Kwong equation is intended to be much more general, but
> exactly because of that it's much less accurate at least for one case
> we care about.
> 
> Side note: according to Wikipedia there are various newer refined
> versions with more complexity (and some with more per-gas constants).
> So it's possible that we could still get it all - both the "multiple
> gases" _and_ "sufficient accuracy“.

I really don’t know what is the correct approach.

First of all, all this compressibility business is really a small effect and we 
are talking about small differences here, so all of this is somewhat academic, 
in particular as Linus has pointed out that we always ignore the effect of gas 
temperature which can be as much as 15%..

The other thing to say is, after rereading the wikipedia page I realized that I 
was getting the calculation for mixtures wrong. I had assumed that it works 
like for van der Waals that you are supposed to take weighted averages of the 
critical data, but you don’t. But the difference this makes for air is much 
smaller than the difference to the empirical numbers. With the corrected 
procedure for mixtures I also calculated the curve for some typical trimix to 
see how important the effect of the gas composition is. Turns out, it is 3-4 
times the difference between the table data and the computed Z. Or put 
differently: This is more significant than the difference between measured and 
modeled Z’s. Or: Taking the tabulated values for air and pretend they are the 
same for trimix gives an error 3-4 times the error from using the model for air.

As Linus said correctly, this model is semi-empirical, it uses some physical 
intuition about the general form of the correction but then plugs in measured 
values (and it is supposed to hold also in a regime where the gas is close to 
liquid). But there are only two per gas but this might be an aesthetic point.

The problem is that beyond the air table from wikipedia, we (or at least I) 
don’t really have empirical data. We don’t know how to extrapolate to other 
gases or we don’t know what to match or which values to take for models with 
more parameters.

I think what we need here is an executive decision from our beloved maintainer: 
How do you want to proceed, there are essentially three options: Linus’ table 
interpolation, Lubomir’s quadratic fit to that table which both cannot handle 
other gases than air or this semi-empirical model with its intrinsic error (in 
which case I would provide a new patch to get the mixing right, the above 
mentioned calculation is in mathematica). All have advantages and disadvantages.

best
Robert

PS: And, yes, I am quite disappointed how bad actually the theoretical models 
like van der Waals and this fit the data. This I did not expect when I started 
looking into this.

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