Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.46, No.11, 3810-3819, 2007
Diffusion of benzyl acetate, 2-phenylethyl acetate, 3-phenylpropyl acetate, and dibenzyl ether in mixtures of carbon dioxide and ethanol
Diffusion coefficients of four solutes at infinite dilution (benzyl acetate, 2-phenylethyl acetate, 3-phenylpropyl acetate, and dibenzyl ether) were measured in the system CO2 + ethanol from 313.16 to 333.16 K and pressures between 15 and 35 MPa over the full concentration range of the CO2 + ethanol mixture. The diffusional behavior in the mixed solvent was compared with the estimation of seven simple predictive equations, Le Blanc, Wilke-Chang, Holmes-Olander-Wilke, Tang-Himmelblau (two formulas), Perkins-Geankoplis, and Leffler-Cullinam, observing that the first two give errors between 17 and 30% and that deviations lower than 11% are only obtained with the expressions of Tang-Himmelblau. Nevertheless, as none of the studied equations considers the self-association of ethanol nor complex formation between solute and alcohol molecules, the model of Lusis-Ratcliff and Mohan-Srnivasan was extended to a ternary liquid-supercritical system with the diffusing component dilute, obtaining average absolute deviations lower than 4.6% for the diffusivities of the four solutes. Nevertheless, the extension of this model is correlative (it needs one adjustable parameter for each solute), not predictive.