Recent advances with association models for practical applications

Association models like Cubic Plus Association (CPA) equation of state and other Statistical Associating Fluid Theory variants have found widespread use, especially over the recent 30 or so years, and this is not limited anymore to universities and researchers. Industry is beginning slowly to adopt such models for some applications and a few of the association models are now provided by commercial simulators. Association models account explicitly for hydrogen bonding (and other complex) phenomena, and for this reason, they are potentially more useful and more successful than traditional models like cubic equations of state and activity coefficient models. Still, for practical applications, all models are judged by their results and these depend on the availability of experimental data, the number and type of adjustable parameters and the performance of the models for phase equilibria and occasionally also for other properties. We will consider four case studies in this work which, will illustrate some of the capabilities and limitations of these association models in different applications. We will offer a ‘model developer’s’ point of view showing in several cases all stages of model development in order to illustrate what worked, what did not and how it was corrected (when possible). The ‘physics’ and ‘application’ aspects of the models will be in all cases discussed. All results will be shown with the CPA equation of state, although we expect that the overall conclusions will be the same for a wide range of association models.