We explore the impact of force field parameters and reaction equilibrium on the scaling behavior towards the critical point in reactive binary systems, focusing on NO ₂/N ₂O ₄. This system can be considered as a special single-component system since NO ₂ and N ₂O ₄ are in chemical equilibrium via the chemical reaction 2NO ₂⇌N ₂O ₄. We simplify the system by representing both components as single LJ particles, achieving excellent agreement with densities computed using molecular simulations in which all-atom force fields were used. We investigate the effect of force field parameters (ɛ and σ) on phase behavior and show that the critical exponent β remains constant, which means that intermolecular interactions do not affect the scaling to the critical point when the chemical reaction takes place. We also investigate the sensitivity of the reaction equilibrium constant and show that even small changes in isolated molecule partition functions lead to large differences in chemical equilibria. We show that the critical exponent β is different for systems with different reaction equilibrium constants, so a careful parameterization of β is needed for an accurate computation of critical temperatures of reactive mixtures. We perform a screening of reactive binary mixtures for a wide range of ideal gas reaction equilibrium constants, revealing key insights into the thermodynamic behavior and critical properties. Thereby we facilitate the efficient screening of reactive binary mixtures for various applications. Our results emphasize the importance of accurately parameterizing β and provide valuable insights into the critical scaling behavior of complex reactive systems.

Experimentally measuring the diffusivities of CO₂ and H₂S in aqueous alkanolamine solutions presents an extremely challenging task. To overcome this challenge, we performed Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations to study the effects of temperature and N-methyldiethanolamine (MDEA) concentration on self-diffusivities of CO₂ (D_CO2) and H₂S (D_H2S) in aqueous MDEA solutions. We compute the densities and viscosities of aqueous MDEA solutions for an MDEA concentration range of 10–50 wt% and a temperature range of 288–333 K showing an excellent agreement with experimental data from literature. We compute the self-diffusivity of MDEA (D_MDEA) in aqueous MDEA solutions and our findings show that the computed values of D_MDEA are in excellent agreement with experimental and simulation results from literature. The self-diffusivities D_CO2 and D_H2S in aqueous MDEA solutions are computed for a wide range of temperatures and MDEA concentrations and our results show that both D_CO2 and D_H2S depend significantly on temperature and MDEA concentration. We also show that both CO₂ and H₂S diffuse slower in aqueous MDEA solutions than in aqueous MEA solutions. By comparing the radial distribution functions of CO₂, H₂S, water, and MDEA, we show that H₂S has stronger interactions with the surrounding molecules than CO₂, which makes H₂S diffuse slower in aqueous MDEA solutions. We also investigate the densities and viscosities of acid gas loaded aqueous MDEA solutions and self-diffusivities of the reaction products of CO₂ and H₂S with aqueous MDEA solutions. We show that the self-diffusivities of CO₂-loaded solutions significantly decrease with increasing CO₂ loading while the self-diffusivities of H₂S-loaded solutions do not change with changing H₂S loading. Our results will be helpful in the design and optimization of acid gas removal units.

We investigated the effect of temperature and monoethanolamine (MEA) concentration on the self-diffusivity of acid gases, CO₂, and H₂S in aqueous MEA solutions. For this purpose, we computed densities of pure MEA and 30 wt% MEA/water solutions while scaling the LJ energy (ϵ) parameter and point charges of MEA. Results show that with a scaling factor of 0.80 applied to the point charges of MEA, computed densities agree well with the experimental ones from literature. This was tested by computing viscosities and the self-diffusivity of pure MEA and 30 wt% MEA/water solutions and comparing these with experiments. We showed that the scaling factor of 0.80 also works well for predicting transport properties of MEA/water solutions. Finally, we computed self-diffusivities of infinitely diluted CO₂ and H₂S for temperatures ranging from 293–353 K and MEA concentrations of 10–50 wt%. Our results show that the self-diffusivity of both acid gases depends significantly on the temperature and MEA concentration in the solution. The results of this study will contribute to the development of more efficient acid gas treatment processes.

We developed an open-source chemical reaction equilibrium solver in Python (CASpy, https://github.com/omoultosEthTuDelft/CASpy) to compute the concentration of species in any reactive liquid-phase absorption system. We derived an expression for a mole fraction-based equilibrium constant as a function of excess chemical potential, standard ideal gas chemical potential, temperature, and volume. As a case study, we computed the CO₂ absorption isotherm and speciation in a 23 wt % N-methyldiethanolamine (MDEA)/water solution at 313.15 K, and compared the results with available data from the literature. The results show that the computed CO₂ isotherms and speciations are in excellent agreement with experimental data, demonstrating the accuracy and the precision of our solver. The binary absorptions of CO₂ and H₂S in 50 wt % MDEA/water solutions at 323.15 K were computed and compared with available data from the literature. The computed CO₂ isotherms showed good agreement with other modeling studies from the literature while the computed H₂S isotherms did not agree well with experimental data. The experimental equilibrium constants used as an input were not adjusted for H₂S/CO₂/MDEA/water systems and need to be adjusted for this system. Using free energy calculations with two different force fields (GAFF and OPLS-AA) and quantum chemistry calculations, we computed the equilibrium constant (K) of the protonated MDEA dissociation reaction. Despite the good agreement of the OPLS-AA force field (ln[K] = −24.91) with the experiments (ln[K] = −23.04), the computed CO₂ pressures were significantly underestimated. We systematically investigated the limitations of computing CO₂ absorption isotherms using free energy and quantum chemistry calculations and showed that the computed values of μ_i^ex are very sensitive to the point charges used in the simulations, which limits the predictive power of this method.

We present several new major features added to the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation code Brick-CFCMC for phase- and reaction equilibria calculations (https://gitlab.com/ETh_TU_Delft/Brick-CFCMC). The first one is thermodynamic integration for the computation of excess chemical potentials (μex). For this purpose, we implemented the computation of the ensemble average of the derivative of the potential energy with respect to the scaling factor for intermolecular interactions (⟨∂U∂λ⟩). Efficient bookkeeping is implemented so that the quantity ∂U∂λ is updated after every MC trial move with negligible computational cost. We demonstrate the accuracy and reliability of the calculation of μex for sodium chloride in water. Second, we implemented hybrid MC/MD translation and rotation trial moves to increase the efficiency of sampling of the configuration space. In these trial moves, short Molecular Dynamics (MD) trajectories are performed to collectively displace or rotate all molecules in the system. These trajectories are accepted or rejected based on the total energy drift. The efficiency of these trial moves can be tuned by changing the time step and the trajectory length. The new trial moves are demonstrated using MC simulations of a viscous fluid (deep eutectic solvent).

Despite the widespread acknowledgment that deep eutectic solvents (DESs) have negligible vapor pressures, very few studies in which the vapor pressures of these solvents are measured or computed are available. Similarly, the vapor phase composition is known for only a few DESs. In this study, for the first time, the vapor pressures and vapor phase compositions of choline chloride urea (ChClU) and choline chloride ethylene glycol (ChClEg) DESs are computed using Monte Carlo simulations. The partial pressures of the DES components were obtained from liquid and vapor phase excess Gibbs energies, computed using thermodynamic integration. The enthalpies of vaporization were computed from the obtained vapor pressures, and the results were in reasonable agreement with the few available experimental data in the literature. It was found that the vapor phases of both DESs were dominated by the most volatile component (hydrogen bond donor, HBD, i.e., urea or ethylene glycol), i.e., 100% HBD in ChClEg and 88%-93% HBD in ChClU. Higher vapor pressures were observed for ChClEg compared to ChClU due to the higher volatility of ethylene glycol compared to urea. The influence of the liquid composition of the DESs on the computed properties was studied by considering different mole fractions (i.e., 0.6, 0.67, and 0.75) of the HBD. Except for the partial pressure of ethylene glycol in ChClEg, all the computed partial pressures and enthalpies of vaporization showed insensitivity toward the liquid composition. The activity coefficient of ethylene glycol in ChClEg was computed at different liquid phase mole fractions, showing negative deviations from Raoult’s law.