to provide an accurate description of the phase behavior of polymer solutions for the
whole range of polymer weight fractions, as pointed out by Gross and Sadowski [48].
They found that the EOS significantly underestimated the cloud point pressure of
polymer solutions at polymer concentrations greater than 10wt.%. This is significant
since the polymer concentration in systems of industrial interest is typically between
10 and 20wt.%.
As evident from previous discussion, all variants of the SAFT including PC-SAFT
have used the chain term originally proposed by Chapman et al. [46, 47]. Hence, a
possible reason for the inaccuracy in polymer phase behavior prediction is inaccu-
racy in this chain term. The chain term was developed from Wertheim’s theory for
associating fluids by forcing spheres to bond, to form a mixture of chain fluids. For
hard chain fluid, although the results are in good agreement with molecular simula-
tion results, the SAFT-HS EOS becomes less accurate as the molecular chain length
increases [47, 80]. Ghonasgi and Chapman [80], and independently Chang and San-
dler [81], demonstrated that a SAFT Dimer EOS for hard-chain fluids, created by
bonding hard-sphere dimers (or diatomics) together to form chain-like molecules is in
excellent agreement with molecular simulation results for long chain molecules [80].
In this work, a new EOS for real fluids based on the SAFT Dimer hard-chain term
has been proposed. The new EOS, labeled as SAFT-D, describes the phase behav-
ior of polymer solutions accurately over the whole range of polymer concentrations.
Moreover, a better representation of the coexistence curves for long chain molecules
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