Normalized Ashurst-Hoover Scaling and a Comprehensive Viscosity Correlation for Compressed Liquids

The recent move toward physics-based elastohydrodynamics promises to yield advances in the understanding of the mechanisms of friction and film generation that were not possible a few years ago. However, the accurate correlation of the low-shear viscosity with temperature and pressure is an essential requirement. The Ashurst-Hoover thermodynamic scaling, which has been useful for thermal elastohydrodynamic simulation, is normalized here in a manner that maps the viscosity of three widely different liquids onto a master Stickel curve. The master curve can be represented by a combination of two exponential power law terms. These may be seen as expressions of different molecular interaction mechanisms similar to the two free-volume models of Batschinski-Hildebrand and Doolittle, respectively. The new correlation promises to yield more reasonable extrapolations to extreme conditions of temperature and pressure than free-volume models, and it removes the singularity that has prevented wide acceptance of free-volume models in numerical simulations.