Binary activity coefficients, regular solution approximation

Consideration of the thermodynamics of nonideal mixing provides a way to determine the appropriate form for the activity coefficients and establish a relationship between the measured enthalpies of mixing and the regular solution approximation. For example, the excess free energy of mixing for a binary mixture can be written as... 

Many reactions encountered in extractive metallurgy involve dilute solutions of one or a number of impurities in the metal, and sometimes the slag phase. Dilute solutions of less than a few atomic per cent content of the impurity usually conform to Henry s law, according to which the activity coefficient of the solute can be taken as constant. However in the complex solutions which usually occur in these reactions, the interactions of the solutes with one another and with the solvent metal change the values of the solute activity coefficients. There are some approximate procedures to make the interaction coefficients in multicomponent liquids calculable using data drawn from binary data. The simplest form of this procedure is the use of the equation deduced by Darken (1950), as a solution of the ternary Gibbs-Duhem equation for a regular ternary solution, A-B-S, where A-B is the binary solvent... 

Perhaps the most important term in Eq. (5.2-3) is the liquid-phase activity coefficient, and methods for its prediction have been developed in maiiy forms and by many workers. For binary systems the Van Laar (Eq. (1.4-18)], Wilson [Eq. (1.4-23)], NRTL (Eq. (1.4-27)], and UmQUAC [Eq. (t.4-3ti)] relationships are useful for predicting liqnid-iffiase nonidealities, but they require some experimental data. When no dim are available, and an approximate nonideality correction will suffice, the UNIFAC approach (Eq. (1.4-31)], which utilizes functional group contributions, may be used. For special cases involving regular solutions (no excess entropy of mixing), the Scatchard-Hildebrand method provides liquid-phase activity coefficients based on easily obtained pure-component properties. 

To a first approximation, the deviations from ideality may be expressed by regular solution theory (Guggenheim, 1952, p. 29), in which the activity coefficient of a component in a binary system is given by the simple expression ... 

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