Modeling of the Vapor-Liquid Equilibria Properties of Binary Mixtures for Refrigeration Machinery

Abstract

The presence of both critical and azeotropic states in the vapor-liquid equilibria (VLE) is a very important issue in the chemical and refrigeration engineering. The knowledge of the phase behavior (subcritical phase/supercritical phase) of refrigerant allows designing and optimizing the refrigeration industrials processes. However, it is rare to find data for this information, which poses a great challenge for researchers to develop predictive and correlative thermodynamic models. The present study proposes the computation of the compositions and pressures of critical and azeotropic points of the isothermal VLE as well as the correlation of experimental VLE data. Firstly, experimental data (PTxy) was used to predict the vapor-liquid phase of both critical and azeotropic behaviors and to determine their properties using the relative volatility model. Secondly, the thermodynamic model (PR-MC-WS-NRTL) was applied to correlate the data of the binary refrigerant systems and describe their isothermal (VLE) behavior. The results proved that there is good agreement between predicted values obtained by the developed model and the experimental reference data. The relative error of both critical and azeotropic properties does not exceed 4.3 % for the molar fraction and 7.5 % for the pressure using relative volatility model. On other hand the relative deviation is respectively less than 2.60 % and 2.58 % for the liquid and vapor mole fractions using (PR-MC-WS-NRTL) model. This shows the ability of these models to give a reliable solution to predict and modulate the phase behavior of the binary refrigerant systems.