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We have investigated a number of structural, thermodynamic and atomic transport properties of various liquid noble and transition metals. The underlying theory combines a simple form of the N-body potential and the thermodynamically self-consistent variational modified hypernetted chain (VMHNC) theory of liquid. The static structure factors calculated by using the VMHNC resemble, as expected, the hard sphere (HS) values. Consequently the HS model is used to calculate thermodynamic properties, viz. the specific heat, entropy, isothermal compressibility and the shear viscosity of liquid Ni, Cu, Ag, and Au. The results are in reasonable accord with the experimental values.

The pair distribution function, g(r), for Ni and Cu at various temperatures above melting are investigated by using the Finnis-Sinclair (FS) many-body potentials and the thermodynamically self-consistent Variational Modified Hypernetted Chain (VMHNC) theory. The overall agreement with experiment is reasonably good. The calculations indicate that the many-body interactions, precisely taken care of by the FS potentials, are important for the study of g(r) for the liquid transition and noble metals. The results also permit us to examine the applicability of the temperature independent approximation of the FS potentials.

Liquid structure for the 3d transition metals near melting is investigated using the linearized Weeks-Chandler-Andersen (LWCA) theory. Here the effective interionic pair potential is described by the Wills-Harrison model. Results show that LWCA predicts the structure factor much better than that of WCA. Results also show that in the middle of the 3d series LWCA predicts reasonable liquid structure where the WCA-ORPA has been unsuccessful.