Process Simulation and Optimization on Ionic Liquids

Ionic liquids (ILs) are promising alternative compounds that enable the development of technologies based on their unique properties as solvents or catalysts. These technologies require integrated product and process designs to select ILs with optimal process performances at an industrial scale to promote cost-effective and sustainable technologies. The digital era and multiscale research methodologies have changed the paradigm from experiment-oriented to hybrid experimental-computational developments guided by process engineering. This Review summarizes the relevant contributions (>300 research papers) of process simulations to advance IL-based technology developments by guiding experimental research efforts and enhancing industrial transferability. Robust simulation methodologies, mostly based on predictive COSMO-SAC/RS and UNIFAC models in Aspen Plus software, were applied to analyze key IL applications: physical and chemical CO2 capture, CO2 conversion, gas separation, liquid-liquid extraction, extractive distillation, refrigeration cycles, and biorefinery. The contributions concern the IL selection criteria, operational unit design, equipment sizing, technoeconomic and environmental analyses, and process optimization to promote the competitiveness of the proposed IL-based technologies. Process simulation revealed that multiscale research strategies enable advancement in the technological development of IL applications by focusing research efforts to overcome the limitations and exploit the excellent properties of ILs.

Application of a Single Multilayer Perceptron Model to Predict the Solubility of CO2 in Different Ionic Liquids for Gas Removal Processes

In this work, 2099 experimental data of binary systems composed of CO2 and ionic liquids are studied to predict solubility using a multilayer perceptron. The dataset includes 33 different types of ionic liquids over a wide range of temperatures, pressures, and solubilities. The main objective of this work is to propose a procedure for the prediction of CO2 solubility in ionic liquids by establishing four stages to determine the model parameters: (1) selection of the learning algorithm, (2) optimization of the first hidden layer, (3) optimization of the second hidden layer, and (4) selection of the input combination. In this study, a bound is set on the number of model parameters: the number of model parameters must be less than the amount of predicted data. Eight different learning algorithms with (4,m,n,1)-type hidden two-layer architectures (m = 2, 4, …, 10 and n = 2, 3, …, 10) are studied, and the artificial neural network is trained with three input combinations with three combinations of thermodynamic variables such as temperature (T), pressure (P), critical temperature (Tc), critical pressure, the critical compressibility factor (Zc), and the acentric factor (ω). The results show that the 4-6-8-1 architecture with the input combination T-P-Tc-Pc and the Levenberg–Marquard learning algorithm is a very acceptable and simple model (95 parameters) with the best prediction and a maximum absolute deviation close to 10%.

Prediction of the Solubility of CO2 in Imidazolium Ionic Liquids Based on Selective Ensemble Modeling Method

Solubility data is one of the essential basic data for CO2 capture by ionic liquids. A selective ensemble modeling method, proposed to overcome the shortcomings of current methods, was developed and applied to the prediction of the solubility of CO2 in imidazolium ionic liquids. Firstly, multiple different sub–models were established based on the diversities of data, structural, and parameter design philosophy. Secondly, the fuzzy C–means algorithm was used to cluster the sub–models, and the collinearity detection method was adopted to eliminate the sub–models with high collinearity. Finally, the information entropy method integrated the sub–models into the selective ensemble model. The validation of the CO2 solubility predictions against experimental data showed that the proposed ensemble model had better performance than its previous alternative, because more effective information was extracted from different angles, and the diversity and accuracy among the sub–models were fully integrated. This work not only provided an effective modeling method for the prediction of the solubility of CO2 in ionic liquids, but also provided an effective method for the discrimination of ionic liquids for CO2 capture.