Model for the Surface Tension of Dilute and Concentrated Binary Aqueous Mixtures as a Function of Composition and Temperature.

Abstract

Surface tension dictates fluid behavior, and predicting its magnitude is vital in many applications. Equations have previously been derived to describe how the surface tension of pure liquids changes with temperature, and other models have been derived to describe how the surface tension of mixtures changes with liquid-phase composition. However, the simultaneous dependence of surface tension on temperature and composition for liquid mixtures has been less studied. Past approaches have required extensive experimental data to which models have been fit, yielding a distinct set of fitting parameters at each temperature or composition. Herein, we propose a model that requires only three fitting procedures to predict surface tension as a function of temperature and composition. We achieve this by analyzing and extending the Shereshefsky (J. Colloid Interface Sci. 1967, 24 (3), 317-322), Li et al. (Fluid Phase Equilib. 2000, 175, 185-196), and Connors-Wright (Anal. Chem. 1989, 61 (3), 194-198) models to high temperatures for 15 aqueous systems. The best extensions of the Shereshefsky, Li et al., and Connors-Wright models achieve average relative deviations of 2.11%, 1.20%, and 0.62%, respectively, over all systems. We thus recommend the extended Connors-Wright model for predicting the surface tension of aqueous mixtures at different temperatures with the tabulated coefficients herein. An additional outcome of this study is the previously unreported equivalence of the Li et al. and Connors-Wright models in describing experimental data of surface tension as a function of composition at a single temperature.