EoSSuperancillaries

Superancillary equations to calculate saturation pressures and critical points for selected equations of state.

This is a Julia port of usnistgov/SAFTsuperanc

Introduction

Saturation calculation always involve iterative calculations. those calculations waste a lot of computing power. superancillaries provide direct equations that return some properties within Float64 accuracy.

It can calculate the following properties:

  • PC-SAFT: critical temperature, critical density, saturated densities.
  • van der Wals: saturated densities, saturated pressures.
  • Redlich-Kwong: saturated densities, saturated pressures.
  • Peng-Robinson: saturated densities, saturated pressures.
  • REFPROP reference equations: saturated densities, saturated pressures.

Installation

You can install EoSSuperancillaries by running the following commands on the julia REPL:

julia> using Pkg

julia> Pkg.add("EoSSuperancillaries")

you can then load the package into your enviroment by writing in the same REPL:

julia> using EoSSuperancillaries

Cubics

The most known cubic equations of state are defined by two parameters: a and b. The calculation of those parameters depends on each equation of state, values of the fluid at the critical point, and in the case of a, additional parameters that are used to define a temperature dependence. For example, if we take the (canonical) peng robinson equation of state:

a =  Ωa * (R * T)^2 / Pc * α(T)
b = Ωb * R * T / Pc
Ωa = 0.45723552892138218938
Ωb = 0.077796073903888455972
α = (1 + κ*(1 - √(T/Tc)))^2
κ = 0.37464 + 1.54226ω - 0.26992ω²

Where Tc,Pc is the critical temperature and pressure, and ω is the acentric factor.

Note

The choice of α(T) does not matter for cubic superancillaries, as we only use the a and b values.

To use cubic superancillaries, the procedure is the following:

  1. Calculate a and b values
  2. pass those values to the adequate EoSSuperancillaries method.
using EoSSuperancillaries, Clapeyron
model = PR("water") #model for comparison.

#usage for cubics
a,b,_ = Clapeyron.cubic_ab(model,0.0,373.15)
#direct calculation using superancillaries, takes about 150 ns
p_eq = pr_psat(373.15,a,b) #96099.13581050883 
vl,vv = pr_vsat(373.15,a,b)
#iterative calculation, takes about 2 μs
p_eq2,vl2,vv2 = Clapeyron.saturation_pressure(model,373.15)[1] #96099.13581050835

All cubic superancillaries are implicitly defined in terms of T̃ =RbT/a, and have a range of application of 0.1T̃c < T̃ < T̃c.

PC-SAFT

The parturbed-chain statistical associating fluid theory (PC-SAFT) equation of state is defined, for non-associating compounds, in terms of the segment length (m), the monomer segment diameter (σ) and the reduced interaction energy (ϵ). Associating compounds require additional parameters (associating interaction energy and associating diameter, among with the number and type of sites), and are not supported by the current superancillary present in the package.

One PCSAFT superancillary calculation for the saturation volumes, involves the following:

  1. calculate the critical temperature (we can do that with pcsaft_tc(m,ϵ)). in particular T̃c = Tc/ϵ = pcsaft_tc(m,1.0) is used.
  2. calculate the minimum temperature (T̃min = T̃c*exp(-2.20078778)*m^0.37627892)
  3. Calculate Θ = (T̃ - T̃min)/(T̃c - T̃min), where T̃ = T/ϵ
  4. with Θ and m, calculate the reduced densities. ρ̃l,ρ̃v
  5. reescale the densities: ρ = ρ̃/(N_A*σ*σ*σ) where N_A is the Avogadro's constant, equal to 6.02214076e23

All those steps are done automatically by calling pcsaft_vsat (or pcsaft_rhosat), but some steps can be cached. For each compound, you can cache T̃c and T̃min, So you can do the following:

function my_pcsaft_rholsat(T,m,ϵ,σ)
    T̃ = T/ϵ
    Tc = pcsaft_tc(m,ϵ) #or from cached location
    T̃c = Tc/ϵ
    T̃min = T̃c*exp(-2.20078778)*m^0.37627892
    θ,status = pcsaft_theta(T̃,m,T̃c,T̃min)
    #you can also check isnan(θ) if you dont care about the exact out of range condition
    if status == :inrange
        ρ̃l = pcsaft_rholsat_reduced(θ,m)
        N_A = 6.02214076e23 #(or EoSSuperancillaries.N_A)
        return ρ̃l/(N_A*σ*σ*σ)
    end

This is useful in the cases where you want to benchmark your own saturation solver, or if you are working with extended precision arithmetic.

REFPROP

Superancillaries for all 147 REFPROP 10.0 fluids have been fitted. those superancillaries cover from the critical point to the triple point of most fluids. for Helium, the minimum temperature is its lambda point.

In this case, you need to instantiate a REFPROPSuperAnc object first and call the superancillaries with that object:

water = refprop_superanc("water")
p0 = ref_psat(water,373.15)

A table with synonyms accepted by refprop_superanc is found here

Notes on low reduced temperatures

With both cubics and PC-SAFT, the saturation curves are defined in a range Tmin < T < Tc. on low reduced temperatures, the magnitude of the proportion between volumes (vv/vl) reaches the limits of Float64 arithmetic. for solving at temperatures below those ranges, it is recommended to use extended precision numbers (like BigFloat).

References

  1. Bell, I. H., & Deiters, U. K. (2021). Superancillary equations for cubic equations of state. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, 60(27), 9983–9991. doi:10.1021/acs.iecr.1c00847
  2. Bell, I. H., & Deiters, U. K. (2023). Superancillary equations for nonpolar pure fluids modeled with the PC-SAFT equation of state. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. doi:10.1021/acs.iecr.2c02916
  3. Bell, I. H. (2024). Superancillary equations for the multiparameter equations of state in REFPROP 10.0. Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data, 53(1). doi:10.1063/5.0191228