Total vapor pressure of hydrophobic deep eutectic solvents: Experiments and modelling

Abstract

Headspace gas chromatography mass spectrometry (HS-GC–MS) was used to determine the volatility of six selected hydrophobic deep eutectic solvents (DESs). The partial pressure of each DES constituent (decanoic acid, thymol, 1-tetradecanol, menthol or lidocaine) was measured from 313.15 to 373.15 K. The activity coefficients of the hydrogen bond acceptor (HBA) and the hydrogen bond donor (HBD) were determined to quantify the interactions between the DES constituents, thereby deepening the understanding of the thermodynamic nature of the DESs. In addition, the activity coefficients for both components in each DES were predicted with the UNIFAC group contribution method. Similar trends and reasonably close values were obtained for the measured and predicted activity coefficients. It has been found that the interactions between the DES constituents tend to become weaker with increasing temperature. Strong interactions occur between thymol and lidocaine, and thymol interacts moderately with menthol. A weak force exists between decanoic acid and menthol. The mixtures of menthol with 1-tetradecanol or lidocaine are not strictly DESs since for each DES constituent both the measured and predicted activity value is close to unity. A viscosity study was also carried out to quantify the interactions and similar results were found. The ideal mixing rule was proven to correctly describe the viscosity for the mixture of menthol with 1-tetradecanol or lidocaine. While compared to the ideal mixture viscosity, an increase in viscosity was observed for other studied DESs indicating stronger interactions. Finally, the Perturbed-Chain Statistical Associating Fluid Theory (PC-SAFT) was shown to accurately describe the thermodynamic properties, where the PC-SAFT pure-component parameters for the DESs were obtained by fitting to pure DES density and total vapor pressure data.