Thermodynamics Research Center / ThermoML | Journal of Chemical and Engineering Data

ABSTRACT

Fructose (1,3,4,5,6-Pentahydroxyhex-2-one) is an important sugar, of great industrial interest and may be produced by crystallization from its aqueous solution by adding ethanol as anti-solvent. Published data of fructose solubility in mixed (ethanol + water) solvent are scarce in literature and is essential for crystallization studies. In this work, fructose solubility in different ethanol concentrations was determined in temperatures from (283.15 to 333.15) K. A group of activity coefficient models developed in literature to determine phase diagrams of sugars were then selected and evaluated to predict fructose solubility in water and (ethanol + water) solvent. It was tested the following models: a modified UNIQUAC, Bio-UNIFAC, A-UNIFAC and mSUNIFAC. Bio-UNIFAC was the best model to predict fructose solubility in water and in solutions with ethanol mass fraction in solvent up to 0.4, mS-UNIFAC was the best one for 0.4 to 0.6 and over this ethanol concentration, the modified UNIQUAC was the best one. The mean deviation of the best model for pure water as solvent was 0.43 % and for mixed solvent the mean deviation of the best model of each composition was always lower than 4 %.