Thermodynamic Study of the Electric Field Effect on Liquid-Vapor Mixture at Equilibrium: An Analysis on a Water-Ethanol Mixture

In this paper, the effect of electricfields on phase equilibriathrough polarization is investigated. A relation is derived for thechemical potential of a system, where the electric field is localizedover a liquid phase mixture in equilibrium with a vapor phase mixture.This relation is then applied to a water-ethanol mixture toexplore the effect of polarization-based electric fields on the liquidphase composition. It is observed that the quadratic dependence onelectric field strength produces little effect below field strengthsof approx. 10 MV/m. However, above this field strength, the mole fractionof water in the liquid phase grows rapidly, increasing by a factorof 8 for a water vapor phase fraction of 0.2 and a field strengthof 500 MV/m, which approaches the dielectric breakdown strength ofwater. Nonetheless, this field strength could be achievable with microfluidicexperimental setups.