Phase Equilibrium Description of a Supercritical Extraction System Using Metaheuristic Optimization Algorithms

Abstract

This chapter describes the ongoing work dealing with the prediction and estimation of vapor-liquid thermodynamic properties using global optimization algorithms. For the present case, phase equilibrium parameters for the system of supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO $$:2$$ ) and some essential oils, were estimated using the corrected version of van der Waals and Wong-Sandler mixing rules, the Peng-Robinson state equation and the more common thermodynamic models for non-linear parameter estimation in equilibrium modeling, namely, Van Laar, NRTL and UNIQUAC. We propose using a variant of the traditional harmony search algorithm, i.e. self-regulated harmony search (SFHS), for this task. Here, we include preliminary simulation results for the system, sCO $$:2$$: $$\alpha $$ -pineno using the Wong-Sandler rule and the Van Laar model. Results show a good agreement between the experimental results reported in the literature, and the predictions using the SFHS algorithm. Furthermore, SFHS seems to be a promising algorithm for processing phase equilibrium data.