WATER SOLUBILITY MEASUREMENTS IN SUPERCRITICAL FLUIDS AND HIGH-PRESSURE LIQUIDS USING NEAR-INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY

A small amount of water added to a supercritical fluid can greatly increase the solubility of polar species in nonpolar fluids. These modified supercritical solutions significantly expand the use of the fluids in separations and reactions. In order to successfully utilize these systems, information on the miscibility or solubility of water in the fluid is required. Often solubility data are not available for water in a supercritical fluid under a given set of temperature and pressure conditions, and a costly set of equipment must be assembled in order to make these measurements. A relatively fast and inexpensive technique to measure water solubilities using a simple long path length optical cell in an FT-IR spectrometer is described. This technique is also applicable to common and newly developed refrigerants where water solubilities are often unknown at temperatures much above ambient. In this paper, water solubility data in carbon dioxide and two types of refrigerants (chlorodifluoromethane, R22; 1,1,1,2-tetrafluoroethane, R134a) are presented for temperatures from approximately 40 to 110 degrees C and pressures from approximately 10 to 344.8 bar.