Entrainer effect in supercritical mixtures

The objective of this paper is to propose a predictive method for the estimation of the change in the solubility of a solid in a supercritical solvent when another solute (entrainer) or a cosolvent is added to the system. To achieve this goal, the solubility equations were coupled with the Kirkwood-Buff (KB) theory of dilute ternary solutions. In this manner, the solubility of a solid in a supercritical fluid (SCF) in the presence of an entrainer or a cosolvent could be expressed in terms of only binary data. The obtained predictive method was applied to six ternary SCF-solute-cosolute and two SCF-solute-cosolvent systems. In the former case, the agreement with experiment was very good, whereas in the latter, the agreement was only satisfactory, because the data were not for the very dilute systems for which the present approach is valid. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.