The vapor-liquid equilibria in the binary mixtures water-formaldehyde and methanol-formaldehyde are precisely correlated by introducing a physicochemical model that takes into account physical forces of interactions as well as chemical reactions. The most valuable feature of the model is its simple extension to multicomponent mixtures. From binary data alone the model is capable of accurately predicting vapor-liquid equilibria in complex mixtures such as formaldehyde-water-trioxane and formaldehyde-water-methanol. This is demonstrated by comparing calculated data with experimental results taken from the literature or measured in this work, at temperatures between about 310 and 400 K at pressures up to 500 kPa, and formaldehyde concentrations in the liquid phase of up to about 70 mol %.
G. Maurer
BASF AG Ludwigshafen, West Germany
SCOPEFormaldehyde is an important raw material for the preparation of many products of the chemical industry-for example, plastics and adhesives-and is produced on a large scale. Because of its extremely high reactivity, formaldehyde is almost never prepared in the pure form, but is usually produced, stored, and processed further in the form of aqueous solutions.The marked tendency for reaction with other substances is a sizable obstacle to modeling the vaporliquid phase equilibrium in multicomponent aqueous formaldehyde solutions. While several methods to correlate the vapor-liquid phase equilibrium of the binary system formaldehyde-water have been described in the literature (Walker, 1964; Brandani et al., 1980; Kogan et al., 1977), there is virtually no method for modeling the vapor-liquid equilibrium in water-and formaldehyde-containing multicomponent mixtures with sufficient accuracy. The study presented here therefore refers to the development and testing of such a method. At first the binary system formaldehyde-water is considered, then the method is extended to ternary systems, the third component being either chemically inert-e.g., trioxane-or chemically reactive with formaldehyde as methanol.
CONCLUSIONS AND SIGNIFICANCEDespite the appreciable industrial importance of such a mixture. Therefore a model was developed that, substances in addition to formaldehyde and water that by taking into account intermolecular forces between react with each other and contain inert or reactive comthe various types of molecules in the liquid phase as ponents, there is no reliable method available in the litwell as the most important chemical reactions, accuerature for describing the vapor-liquid equilibrium in rately predicts from information on binary systems alone, the vapor-liquid equilibrium in multicomponent formaldehyde and water-containing mixtures.
The correlation starts from a model for the binaryThe present address of G. Maurer is Lehrstuhl fur Technische Thermcdynamik. Univcrsilat Kaiserslautcrn, Federal Republic of Germany.
932June 1986 Vol. 32, No. 6 AlChE Journal system formaldehyde-water. The equilibrium constants for the most important chemical reactions-e.g., the formation of m...