Possibility of pressure crossover prediction by classical DFT for sparingly dissolved compounds in scCO2

Abstract A new method of solubility estimations, applied to sparingly dissolved compounds in supercritical carbon dioxide has been introduced in this paper. The method is based on determination of solubility contributions along the thermodynamic path consisting of sublimation and solvation processes. The contribution of the sublimation process is taken from the experiment, while the free energy of solvation is calculated from the classical density functional theory based on the fundamental measure theory. The parameterization of potential was performed using the Weeks-Chandler-Anderson procedure, where the Lennard-Jones parameters were obtained from the thermodynamics data of solute and solvent critical points. The introduced method can efficiently predict the pressure crossover on solubility curve of sparingly dissolved compounds in supercritical carbon dioxide.