Liquid–liquid equilibrium for systems of glycerol and glycerol tert-butyl ethers

Liquid–liquid equilibrium data for three ternary systems which contain glycerol and its etherification (tert-butylation) products including mono-tert-butyl ethers of glycerol (ME), di-tert-butyl ethers of glycerol (DE) and tri-tert-butyl ether of glycerol (TE) in the temperature range of 343.2–373.2 K under 101.3 kPa were obtained by phase equilibrium experiments. Reliability of the experimental data was verified by Othmer–Tobias equation. The non-random two liquid (NRTL) model was employed to describe the equilibrium compositions, and corresponding binary interaction parameters were estimated by data regression. The modeling results agreed well with measured data. In addition, three UNIFAC based methods were also adapted to model liquid–liquid equilibrium behavior for these systems; however, the predicted results emerged obvious deviation from experimental results.