The aim of this work is to report the experimental data and thermodynamic modeling of phase equilibrium of binary systems containing soybean and olive oils with propane and n-butane. Phase equilibrium experiments were carried out using the static synthetic method in a high-pressure variable-volume view cell in the temperature range from 30 to 70ºC and varying the solvent overall composition from 5 to 98 wt%. Vapor-liquid, liquid-liquid and vapor-liquid-liquid phase transitions were observed at relatively low pressures. The Peng-Robinson and the SAFT equations of state without any binary interaction parameters were employed in an attempt at representing the phase behavior of the systems. Results show the satisfactory performance of SAFT-EoS in predicting qualitatively all phase transitions reported in this work.

The Vrentas/Duda proposal for the diffusion of polymer-solvent systems, which is based on the free-volume theory, was employed in correlating and predicting mutual diffusion coefficients in highly concentrated polymer solutions. It has been observed that the predictive version of the model is capable of qualitatively representing the experimental data, while the use of an adjustable parameter greatly improves the performance of the model. The systems studied were poly(vinyl) acetate-toluene and Neoprene-acetone, and a comparison between experimental data and calculated values from the Vrentas/Duda model is reported. A new experimental apparatus based on the sorption technique was built to provide reliable diffusivity data on the Neoprene-acetone system.