Estimation of interfacial tension between organic liquid mixtures and water

Knowledge of IFT values for chemical mixtures helps guide the design and analysis of various processes, including NAPL remediation with surfactants or alcohol flushing, enhanced oil recovery, and chemical separation technologies, yet available literature values are sparse. A comprehensive comparison of thermodynamic and empirical models for estimating interfacial tension (IFT) of organic chemical mixtures with water is conducted, mainly focusing on chlorinated organic compounds for 14 ternary, three quaternary, and one quinary systems. Emphasis is placed on novel results for systems with three and four organic chemical compounds, and for systems with composite organic compounds like lard oil and mineral oil. Seven models are evaluated: the ideal and nonideal monolayer models (MLID and MLNID), the ideal and nonideal mutual solubility models (MSID and MSNID), an empirical model for ternary systems (EM), a linear mixing model based on mole fractions (LMMM), and a newly developed linear mixing model based on volume fractions of organic mixtures (LMMV) for higher order systems. The two ideal models (MLID and MSID) fit ternary systems of chlorinated organic compounds without surface active compounds relatively well. However, both ideal models did not perform well for the mixtures containing a surface active compound. However, for these systems, both the MLNID and MSNID models matched the IFT data well. It is shown that the MLNID model with a surface coverage value (0.00341 mmol/m2) obtained in this study can practically be used for chlorinated organic compounds. The LMMM results in poorer estimates of the IFT as the difference in IFT values of individual organic compounds in a mixture increases. The EM, with two fitting parameters, provided accurate results for all 14 ternarysystems including composite organic compounds. The new LMMV method for quaternary and higher component systems was successfully tested. This study shows that the LMMV may be able to be used for higher component systems and it can be easily incorporated into compositional multiphase flow models using only parameters from ternary systems.