Modified Wilson's Model for Correlating Solubilities in Supercritical Fluids of Some Polycyclic Aromatic Solutes

ABSTRACT

Since developing mathematical models is extremely useful to determine solubilities of various solutes in supercritical fluids (SCFs); in this work, the “expanded liquid” approach is adopted to predict the solubility of some polycyclic aromatic solutes (with different size, functionality, and polarity) in diverse SCFs. A modified form of the Wilson's model is proposed for predicting the solubilities of the considered binary systems by computation of the activity coefficient based on the local composition concept. Effect of high operating conditions is considered via the variation of the molar volume of the solute. The proposed correlation achieves an overall and average AARD of 9.2% and 7.8%, respectively, on a range of 1.14% to 19.9%, these results show that the predicted solubility data are in good agreement with the experimental ones. Moreover, dependence of binary parameters on density and some solute's characteristics is discussed on the base of their course versus solvent reduced density.

KEYWORDS:

• Empirical character
• expanded liquid treatment
• solubility correlation
• solution models
• supercritical fluids
• Wilson's model

Acknowledgments

The author appreciates helpful discussion with Pr. A.H. Meniai, Faculty of Génie des procédés, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Constantine 3, Algeria. Also the author thanks Dr Z. Bensetiti, Unisignal Inc., Quebec, Canada, for his precious guidance.