Binary solid–liquid–gas equilibrium of the tripalmitin/CO 2 and ubiquinone/CO 2 systems

Abstract

A conventional method was used to measure the melting points of the natural lipid tripalmitin and of the coenzyme ubiquinone (coQ10) under high pressure carbon dioxide. The pressure–temperature behavior of the binary three-phase solid–liquid–gas (SLG) equilibrium for these and other systems, namely naphthalene and biphenyl with carbon dioxide, ethylene and ethane, were investigated using the Peng–Robinson equation of state (PR-EoS) with the van der Waals one fluid (vdw-1) mixing rules and with the NRTL equation to calculate the solute activity in the liquid phase. When the interaction parameter in the vdw-1 mixing rules could be determined by the PR-EoS through the correlation of the solid–fluid phase equilibrium data, the two NRTL parameters were used as adjustable parameters. The results showed that fairly good correlations could be achieved for the experimental pressure–temperature data of all the asymmetric systems studied here, indicating that the NRTL parameters are crucial for describing the pressure–temperature behavior but have little effect on the phase compositions at the SLG equilibrium.