Influence of temperature and molecular structure on organics-biodiesel interactions using group contribution methods

Resulting from the trend of increasingly stringent environmental legislation, the drive to secure environmentally friendly absorption solvents has gained much impetus in recent times. In order to design and operate separation processes units, it is essential that the engineer has accurate and reliable knowledge of the phase equilibrium behaviour of the system in question. Since obtaining experimental data on the system can be time-consuming, the use of thermodynamic models is often useful in obtaining preliminary design and feasibility study information. This work examines the suitability of biodiesel (particularly the constituents methyl palmitate and methyl linolenate) as an absorbent solvent for the recovery of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from waste process gas streams. In particular, activity coefficients were measured in the dilute region in an attempt to predict the effects of molecular structure and temperature on the solubility of the VOCs in the methyl esters under study. The group contribution methods UNIFAC and Modified UNIFAC Dortmund, set up on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, were used to predict the required phase equilibrium at infinite dilution. The results obtained in this work compared reasonably well with published literature.