Modeling the phase behavior of cyclic compounds in mixtures of water, alcohols and hydrocarbons

• GCA-EoS is extended to handle mixtures containing cycloalkanes and cycloalkanols.
• Surface area of cyclic functional groups depends on number of carbons in the cycle.
• The same set of parameters is used for VLE and LLE calculations.
• VLE and LLE of mixtures representing alcohol/gasoline blends are well represented.

In this work the GCA-EoS model is applied to represent the phase behavior of systems containing cyclic hydrocarbons, alcohols and water. The presence of naphthenic hydrocarbons in normal fossil fuels makes this information important for the prediction of properties of bioethanol/gasoline blends. Since GCA-EoS is a group contribution equation of state, also cyclo-alcohols were included in the study to increase the experimental databank for tuning the model parameters. The GCA-EoS was able to correlate and predict the phase behavior of multicomponent mixtures typical of bioethanol/gasoline blends.