Chemical and Phase Equilibria in the Process of Esterification of Acetic Acid with Ethanol in the Presence of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide

Due to their adaptable nature, supercritical fluids have many applications in extraction, separation and reactive processes. Since the applications of supercritical fluids are being commercialized and their use is increasing, a profound understanding of the phasic behavior of these fluids is receiving attention. Due to the difficult and costly experimental measurements, using thermodynamic models can reduce the number of needed experimental data for a particular design. In this paper, cubic standard equations of state with the Van Der Waals mixing rules and materials critical data was used to study chemical and phase equilibria for the esterification of acetic acid with ethanol in the presence of supercritical CO2. The results show that both SRK and PR models successfully predicts processes containing supercritical CO2. Both models relatively have predicted two dense gas and liquid phases in 333 K and 58.6 bar condition, which is in line with experimental results. The equilibrium constants obtained from both models in 355 & 358 K had up to 4% difference with experimental values.