Correlating vapour-liquid equilibria of binary HI + H2O mixtures using Pitzer's model of electrolyte solutions

The need to produce Hydrogen in an environmentally friendly manner has increased as the transportation industry has started to employ cleaner sources of energy. One of the cleaner ways to produce H2, is to use the Bunsen S-I cycle. This includes the separation of the H2 from an ionic mixture of Hydrogen Iodide and water using distillation. In this work, the Pitzer's model for electrolyte solutions has been employed to represent the vapour-liquid equilibrium (VLE) of the binary system of HI and H2O. The activity coefficient (γ) is calculated from the equation which indicated the non-ideal nature of the system and aided the calculation of the vapour phase mole fraction. The experimental VLE data was obtained from a recirculating still at 101.3 kPa pressure for the binary system. This experimental data and data from literature was used to estimate the parameters of the Pitzer's model to represent the activity coefficient of HI in this mixture. These optimized parameters could explain all the variations in the data with more that 90% accuracy for most of the data, with an average standard deviation of about 0.04. Furthermore, the temperature dependent form of the Pitzer's equation was used to predict the VLE data at higher pressures of 3 and 5.7 bars and higher temperature conditions.