Transferable force field for carboxylate esters: application to fatty acid methylic ester phase equilibria prediction

In this work, a new transferable united-atoms force field for carboxylate esters is proposed. All Lennard-Jones parameters are reused from previous parametrizations of the AUA4 force field, and only a unique set of partial electrostatic charges is introduced for the ester chemical function. Various short alkyl-chain esters (methyl acetate, ethyl acetate, methyl propionate, ethyl propionate) and two fatty acid methylic esters (methyl oleate and methyl palmitate) are studied. Using this new force field in Monte Carlo simulations, we show that various pure compound properties are accurately predicted: saturated liquid densities, vapor pressures, vaporization enthalpies, critical properties, liquid-vapor surface tensions. Furthermore, a good accuracy is also obtained in the prediction of binary mixture pressure-composition diagrams, without introducing empirical binary interaction parameters. This highlights the transferability of the proposed force field and gives the opportunity to simulate mixtures of industrial interest: a demonstration is performed through the simulation of the methyl oleate + methanol mixture involved in the purification sections of biodiesel production processes.