The solubility of tacrolimus in a supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO2) with and without co-solvent (ternary and binary system) was investigated. The experimental conditions include the temperatures of 308 to 338 K and the pressures of 12 to 30 MPa were considered. The values of tacrolimus solubilization in SC-CO2 in binary and ternary systems were from 0.416 × 10−5 to 1.589 × 10−5 and from 0.389 × 10−4 to 0.875 × 10−4, respectively. The obtained results presented that adding a co-solvent (ethanol) could affect tacrolimus solubility significantly, the mole fraction of tacrolimus in SC-CO2/co-solvent under all experimental conditions was at least 4.9 more than that of SC-CO2 alone. The correlation of the solubility data was achieved by three distinct methods: (1) SRK EoS with van der Waals (vdW2) and Wong-Sandler (WS) as mixing rules, (2) solution theory, (3) empirical and (4) machine learning based models. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) results showed that Sparks et al. (AIC −817.05, and AARD 5.08 %) and Bian et al. (AIC −815.77 and AARD 5.17 %) models could correlate the experimental data of tacrolimus in SC-CO2 with more accuracy, as compared to the other empirical models. Sodeifian and Sajadian model with AARD% and AIC of 2.99 and −726.22, respectively, has acted as the most accurate empirical model in ternary system. The solution theory was able to calculate the solubility for the tacrolimus-SC-CO2-ethanol system with high accuracy (AARD, % 4.85, AIC −701.41, F value 169.70 and Radj 0.9622). Also, the Gradient Boosting model (AARD accurately predicted the outcomes with perfect accuracy for binary and ternary systems. Finally, total (ΔHtotal, 23.21 cal/mol), solvation (ΔHsol, −19.47 cal/mol) and vaporization (ΔHvap, 42.68 cal/mol) enthalpies were obtained by using an energy term in Chrastil and Bartle models.
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