Tetraalkylammonium bromide series

The salt effects of potassium bromide and a series office symmetrical tetraalkylammonium bromides on vapor-liquid equilibrium at constant pressure in various ethanol-water mixtures were determined. For these systems, the composition of the binary solvent was held constant while the dependence of the equilibrium vapor composition on salt concentration was investigated these studies were done at various fixed compositions of the mixed solvent. Good agreement with the equation of Furter and Johnson was observed for the salts exhibiting either mainly electrostrictive or mainly hydrophobic behavior however, the correlation was unsatisfactory in the case of the one salt (tetraethylammonium bromide) where these two types of solute-solvent interactions were in close competition. The transition from salting out of the ethanol to salting in, observed as the tetraalkylammonium salt series is ascended, was interpreted in terms of the solute-solvent interactions as related to physical properties of the system components, particularly solubilities and surface tensions. 

Tables IV-XVI show that the tetraalkylammonium salts have a large effect on both solvents in the binary solvent mixture, especially the larger tetraalkylammonium bromides, i.e., (n-C3H7)4NBr and (n-C4Hg)4NBr. This can be seen from consideration of the boiling temperature alone. This observation is also borne out by the surface tensions and solubilities at 25°C of the individual salts studied, the results of which are tabulated in Table XVII in water, in ethanol, and in an ethanol-water mixture at x = 0.206. For the higher homologs of the R4NBr series, these salts exert a large effect on the surface tensions of the solvent systems studied and show a marked increase in their solubility in ethanol.

Figure 1 Predicted (QSPR) vs. experimental melting points for a series of tetraalkylammonium bromide salts R = 0.775).

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