New perspectives in transport phenomena in electrolytes

Using the Fuoss-Onsager theory we recently obtained simple expressions for the variation with concentration of the transport coefficients of electrolytes in aqueous solution. We studied self-diffusion, conductance of binary and ternary ionic mixtures, and micellar systems. We used in the formulation of the mean spherical approximation (MSA) pair correlation functions which yield explicit formulas in terms of the MSA inverse screening lenght Γ and the dynamical Debye-Falkenhagen lengths. It was found that the use of more accurate correlation functions, such as HNC, did not produce a significant improvement in the results. Associated electrolytes are also well described by a natural extension of this theory. Our simple expressions yield good agreement with the experiments for both unassociated and associated electrolytes.