This review presents recent advances and applications of statistical associating fluid theory (SAFT), which has been extended in the past few years, conceptually and practically, to improve its performance and to represent thermodynamic properties of complex systems, such as associating polymers, polydispersed polymers, aqueous electrolytes, dipolar and quadrupolar systems, ionic liquids, near-critical systems, interfacial phenomena, crystallizable copolymers, gas hydrates, liquid crystals, biomaterials, and oil reservoir fluids, as well as dynamic properties such as viscosity.

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The square-well fluid thermodynamics and liquid structure derived from Barker-Henderson's perturbation theory, including a truncation correction, are used within a SAFT framework to develop a prototype of an engineering equation of state for alkane chains, referred to as SAFT1. For small n-alkanes, not only the vapor pressure and liquid density, but also the second virial coefficient, heat of vaporization, and heat capacity, are found to be more accurate. SAFT1 parameters are well behaved and hence easy to estimate reliably for high-molecular-weight alkanes and polyolefins. These parameters are found to predict cloud points in mixtures of homo-and heterosegmented molecules, such as polyolefins, without fitting. IntroductionIn chemical and polymer technology, we need thermodynamic models that are more and more predictive and less and less dependent on fitting to experimental data. The mathematical simplicity and the ease of coding, therefore, become relatively less important virtues, but the ease of estimating the parameters quickly and reliably becomes a very important virtue. One of the popular approaches to developing such thermodynamic models is rooted in perturbation theory, for example, the statistical associating fluid theory (SAFT).The SAFT equations of state have the following terms: a segment term that accounts for the nonideality of the reference fluid of nonbonded chain segments (monomers), a chain term that accounts for covalent bonding, and an association term that accounts for hydrogen bonding that leads to association. There may also be an optional term that accounts for polarity. The main differences between different versions of SAFT stem from how the segment and chain terms are estimated.For example, an engineering version of SAFT was developed by Huang and Radosz 1,2 on the basis of an argon equation of state (the so-called BACK equation of state) for the segment term and a hard-sphere paircorrelation function for the chain term. That version of SAFT has become popular because it is user-friendly; its parameters are well behaved and hence relatively easy to estimate for new large molecules. Furthermore, it has been extended to heterosegmented chains by Banaszak et al. 3 That extension, referred to as copolymer SAFT, explicitly accounts for variable polyolefin microstructure due to the variability in comonomer incorporation. A generic SAFT approach for developing equations of state has been proposed by Chapman et al. 4

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Implementing Paris Climate Accord is inhibited by the high energy consumption of the state-of-the-art CO2 capture technologies due to the notoriously slow kinetics in CO2 desorption step of CO2 capture. To address the challenge, here we report that nanostructured TiO(OH)2 as a catalyst is capable of drastically increasing the rates of CO2 desorption from spent monoethanolamine (MEA) by over 4500%. This discovery makes CO2 capture successful at much lower temperatures, which not only dramatically reduces energy consumption but also amine losses and prevents emission of carcinogenic amine-decomposition byproducts. The catalytic effect of TiO(OH)2 is observed with Raman characterization. The stabilities of the catalyst and MEA are confirmed with 50 cyclic CO2 sorption and sorption. A possible mechanism is proposed for the TiO(OH)2-catalyzed CO2 capture. TiO(OH)2 could be a key to the future success of Paris Climat e Accord.

Statistical Associating Fluid Theory coupled with Restricted Primitive Model (SAFT1-RPM) represents the mean ionic activity coefficient, density, osmotic coefficient, and vapor pressure of several aqueous alkali halide solutions, in a framework that is analogous to the nonelectrolyte framework. SAFT1 alone represents pure water, including the density anomaly. Each SAFT1 salt molecule consists of two segments:  cation and anion.