Effects of excluded volume of nucleons on nuclear matter are studied,
and the nuclear properties that follow from different relativistic
mean-field model parametrizations are compared. We show that, for all
tested parametrizations, the resulting volume energy a1 and the symmetry
energy J are around the acceptable values of 16 MeV and 30 MeV, and
the density symmetry L is around 100 MeV. On the other hand, models that
consider only linear terms lead to incompressibility K0 much higher than
expected. For most parameter sets there exists a critical point (ρc,δc), where the minimum and the maximum of the equation of state
are coincident and the incompressibility equals zero. This critical point
depends on the excluded volume parameter r. If this parameter is larger
than 0.5 fm, there is no critical point and the pure neutron matter is
predicted to be bound. The maximum value for neutron star mass is
1.85M⊙, which is in agreement with the mass of the heaviest observed
neutron star 4U0900-40 and corresponds to r = 0.72 fm. We also show that the
light neutron star mass (1.2M⊙) is obtained for r≃0.9 fm.