Phase equilibrium data at high pressures for CO2-Limonene and CO2-Citral binary systems and for CO2-Limonene-Citral ternary systems were collected from literature and employed in a thermodynamic modelling that uses the PENG-ROBINSON equation of state with: (1) classical mixture rule; (2) STRYJEK & VERA composition dependant mixture rule. The binary interaction parameters for the CO2-Limonene and CO2-Citral systems were obtained by fitting the models to the experimental data using two computational programmes that involved the minimisation of an objective function by the simplex method as suggested by NELDER & MEAD, written as a function of the deviation between experimental and calculated data. The phase equilibrium for the ternary systems was calculated using the previously fitted binary interaction parameters fitting, disregarding those parameters relative to Limonene and Citral. The results showed that, under supercritical conditions, the two models employed in the present work were capable of qualitatively predicting the phase equilibrium for the ternary systems.
equation of state; essential oils; phase equilibrium
