For
absorption refrigeration, it has been shown that ionic liquids
have the potential to replace conventional working pairs. Due to the
huge number of possibilities, conducting lab experiments to find the
optimal ionic liquid is infeasible. Here, we provide a proof-of-principle
study of an alternative computational approach. The required thermodynamic
properties, i.e., solubility, heat capacity, and heat of absorption,
are determined via molecular simulations. These properties are used
in a model of the absorption refrigeration cycle to estimate the circulation
ratio and the coefficient of performance. We selected two ionic liquids
as absorbents: [emim][Tf2N], and [emim][SCN]. As refrigerant
NH3 was chosen due to its favorable operating range. The
results are compared to the traditional approach in which parameters
of a thermodynamic model are fitted to reproduce experimental data.
The work shows that simulations can be used to predict the required
thermodynamic properties to estimate the performance of absorption
refrigeration cycles. However, high-quality force fields are required
to accurately predict the cycle performance.
Monte Carlo (MC) simulations in ensembles with a fixed chemical potential or fugacity, for example the grand-canonical or the osmotic ensemble, are often used to compute phase equilibria. Chemical potentials can be computed either with an equation of state (EoS) or from molecular simulations. The accuracy of the computed chemical potentials depends on the quality of the (critical) parameters used in the EoS and the applied force field in the simulations. We investigated the consistency of both approaches for computing fugacities of the industrially relevant gases CO 2 , CH 4 , CO, H 2 , N 2 , and H 2 S. The critical temperature (T c), pressure (P c), and acentric factors (ω) of these gases are computed from MC simulations in the Gibbs ensemble. The effect of cutoff radius and tail corrections on the computed values of T c , P c , and ω is investigated. In addition, MC simulations in the Gibbs ensemble are used to compute the VLE of the 15 possible binary systems comprising the gases CO 2 , CH 4 , CO, H 2 , N 2 , and H 2 S, and the ternary systems CO 2 /CH 4 /H 2 S and CO 2 /CO/H 2. Binary interaction parameters (k ij) of these natural/synthesis gas mixtures are obtained by fitting the Peng-Robinson (PR) EoS to the binary VLE data from the MC simulations. The computed properties from the MC simulations are compared with the PR EoS, the GERG EoS, and experimental results. The MC results show that including tail corrections in the simulations is crucial to obtain accurate critical properties. The force fields used for the gases can reproduce the fugacities of the gases within 5% of
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.