by Usseglio » 14 October 2017, 15:28
Hello, I work in the field of carboxylic acids stripping from vegetable oils.
Vapor association, as it was already said, it is one of the chemical explanations regarding why some compounds departure from vapor phase ideality, in case of carboxylic acids, can form dimers. But this is only significant under high pressure conditions. In the case of carboxylic acids stripping, that is carried out a very low absolute pressure, I found that against actual plant results, there is no difference in distillate composition considering ideal phase on one hand and non-ideal phase including vapor association.
So if the pressure of your process works under low pressure, I would say you can treat the system as vapor phase as ideal, since results will be in accordance with actual results.