Virial expansion

The virial expansion is a model of thermodynamic equations of state. This model expresses the pressure P of a gas in local equilibrium as a power series of the density. This equation may be represented in terms of the compressibility factor, $Z$ , as

Z\equiv {\frac {P}{RT\rho }}=A+B\rho +C\rho ^{2}+\cdots

This equation was first proposed by Kamerlingh Onnes. The terms A, B, and C represent the virial coefficients. The leading coefficient, A, is defined as the constant value of 1, which enforces that the equation reduces to the ideal gas expression as the gas density approaches zero.

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