georgeoverghese,
Does this Ludtke book give us an idea of how different these two values of n are for some typical gas and operating pressure range?
Absolutely. Don't know about pressure ranges, guess accuracy is purpose driven.
I've done so many of these calcs for projects in the past, and I dont recall any significant discrepancies with compressor vendor predictions, so I suspect these two values must be nearly the same?
Not always, for example low temperature and/or high pressure could result in a huge difference between Cp0/Cv0 (ideal), Cp/Cv, kv and kt. They would also depart from each other, thus resulting in inaccuracies (from discrepancies to serious deviations) in compression process calculations.
In addition and that is my opinion, if your compressor conditions fall "slightly" in the liquid-vapor envelop / non homogeneous phase (that can happen), expect also deviations.
Example: -> I computed via GERG EOS an hypothetic cas composition 81%Methane, 13.5%CO2, 2.7%Ethane, 1.8%n-Hexane, 0.9%n-Heptane (approx. and in mol. weight%).
at Pressure 50 MPa, Temperature 420K: Kt=1.21, Kv=2.52, Cp/Cv=1.47
at Pressure 0.5 MPa, Temperature 420K: Kt=1.22, Kv=1.22, Cp/Cv=1.22
Zdas, agree with your statement, makes full sense.