Assessing Thermodynamics Models for Phase Equilibria and Interfacial Properties Relevant to the Hydrogenation of Carbon Dioxide

The catalytic hydrogenation of carbon dioxide has become a novel technology of economic and environmental interest that allows the production of value-added products as energy alternatives to the current demand. As product distributions are highly dependent on process conditions such as reaction temperature, pressure, and H₂/CO₂ ratio, it is necessary to have reliable thermodynamic models that can characterize mixtures of reactants with products over a wide range of conditions. In this contribution, the accuracy of two hydrogen models applied through equations of state (EOS) framed within variations of the statistical associating fluid theory (SAFT) is compared. These models include perturbed-chain SAFT (PC-SAFT) EOS and SAFT of variable range and Mie potential (SAFT-VR Mie) EOS. This is accomplished by the depiction of the thermodynamic behavior of mixtures of hydrogen in the context of the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide, estimating the thermodynamic behavior of the relevant mixtures. In all of the cases, zero values for the binary adjustable parameters have been implemented, and both models of hydrogen were fitted from a hydrogen+decane mixture. Available experimental data of high-pressure phase equilibria, critical loci, and interfacial tensions is used to determine the accuracy of the hydrogen models by contrasting their respective predictive capabilities, determining that the overall performance of the one applied in the SAFT-VR Mie EOS is inferior compared to the PC-SAFT one. The average absolute deviations between model calculations and experimental data for vapor–liquid equilibrium are 35.8 % (pressure), 3.10 % (liquid composition), and 2.60 % (vapor composition) for PC-SAFT, and 26.3, 3.27, and 2.65% for SAFT-VR Mie, respectively.