VARIATIONAL CALCULATION OF TRANSPORT COEFFICIENTS IN A BINARY MIXTURE

For the case of a binary mixture it is shown that it is possible to formulate the calculation of the coefficients of viscosity, thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, and diffusion in terms of variational principles. These are such that a first-order error in the trial function representing the departure of the distribution functions from their local thermal equilibrium values leads to a second-order error in the transport coefficients. For those coefficients which are intrinsically positive the variational method reduces to an absolute maximum principle.