Equilibrium and rate-based approaches to liquid-liquid phase splitting calculations

Several approaches are presented that can be used to compute liquid-liquid phase splitting. These approaches are based on homotopy continuation methods or on non-equilibrium thermodynamics. It is shown that they exhibit quite different computational demands with respect to computation times and a suggestion is made as to which algorithm to use. For chemical systems with only a few components, the computation times encountered on a normal PC in most cases are only a few milliseconds, in some cases even less-suggesting the general use of such algorithms to assure that phase splitting is always detected when present.