Evaluation of the ratio of the evaporation energy to the activation energy for estimating the thermodiffusion coefficient

Thermodiffusion has an important role in displacements of hydrocarbon reservoir. The ratio of the evaporation energy to the activation energy of viscous flow in pure limits, τ_pure,k, is of a great importance in estimating the thermodiffusion coefficient for non‐associating fluid mixtures. Several methods may be used to estimate τ_pure,k which causes different values for thermodiffusion coefficients. A fixed value for τ_pure,k was considered to predict the thermodiffusion coefficient. In this paper, Abbasi et al.'s [J. Non‐Equilib. Thermodyn. 2010;35:1–14] model and Shukla and Firoozabadi's model have been applied to predict thermodiffusion coefficients for linear chain hydrocarbon binary mixtures. The results show a very good performance of the simple approach in respect to the previous models in estimating thermodiffusion coefficients. © 2011 Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering