Carbon dioxide solubility in aqueous sulfolane solution

Abstract

New experimental data are presented for the solubility of carbon dioxide in aqueous sulfolane (SFL) solution, an important solvent with applications in a variety of chemical industries. Solvent mixtures of (SFL + H2O) studied in this work contain the composition range xSFL = (0.0999–0.9313), temperatures from (303.15 to 353.15) K, with step 10 K, and total pressures up to 1.3 MPa. Solubility data and Henry’s law constants of CO2 solubility in pure SFL, pure H2O and mixed (SFL + H2O) are reported on mole fraction base. Results show that, CO2 solubility in mixed solvents increases with increasing pressure and gas-free mole fraction of SFL and also decrease with increasing temperature. A model based on the Gibbs excess energy of mixed solvent was used to correlate the obtained experimental data. The correlated values, with an average and maximum relative percent deviation of 1.78% and 7.55% from the obtained experimental data, show that the model is able to represent the experimental data with good correlative accuracy.