The influence of the unlike Lennard-Jones (LJ) parameters on vapor-liquid equilibria of mixtures is investigated and the performance of eleven combining rules is assessed. In the first part of the work, the influence of the unlike LJ size and energy parameter on vapor pressure, bubble density and dew point composition is systematically studied for the mixtures CO+C 2 H 6 and N 2 +C 3 H 6 , respectively. It is found that mixture vapor pressure depends strongly both on the size and the energy parameter whereas the bubble density depends mostly on the size parameter and the dew point composition is rather insensitive to both parameters. In preceding work, unlike LJ parameters were adjusted to experimental binary vapor-liquid equilibria for 44 real mixtures. On the basis of these results, in the second part of the work eleven combining rules are assessed regarding their predictive power. A comparison with the adjusted unlike LJ parameters determined from the fit shows that none of the eleven combining rules yields appropriate parameters in general. To obtain an accurate mixture model, the unlike dispersive interaction should therefore be adjusted to experimental binary data. The results from the present work indicate that it is sufficient to use the Lorenz rule for the unlike LJ size parameter and to fit the unlike LJ energy parameter to the vapor pressure.In molecular simulations of a binary mixture A+B with pairwise additive potentials, three different interactions occur: two like interactions between molecules of the same type A-A and B-B, which are fully defined by the pure component models, and the unlike interaction between molecules of different type A-B. In mixtures consisting of polar molecules, the electrostatic part of the unlike interaction is fully determined by the laws of electrostatics. However, there is no rigorous physical framework that yields reliable unlike repulsion and dispersion parameters like the Lennard-Jones (LJ) parameters studied in the present work. For finding these parameters, combining rules were developed in the past based on physical and mathematical intuition or on empirical approaches. Eleven of these combining rules were investigated in the present work.These combining rules rely soley on pure component data, namely the LJ parameters and, in some cases, additionally the polarizablility α or the ionization potential I. Other combining rules, that are not discussed in this work, also employ dispersion force coefficients [1, 2, 3], diamagnetic susceptibility [4,5] or effective transition energies [6,7].Another approach for obtaining unlike LJ parameters is to adjust them directly to experimental binary data, for which a single data point may in principle be sufficient. Kohler et al. [8] fitted both unlike LJ parameters to experimental second virial coefficients of binary mixtures.Following this approach, Möller et al.[9] developed a method for adjusting the unlike LJ size and energy parameters to experimental excess volumes and enthalpies. Their investigations showed that the un...