Abstract
A method has been developed for judging the existence of the quaternary azeotrope in a quaternary system at constant pressure by use of a topological condition to be satisfied by the indices of pure materials and azeotropes and a thermodynamic condition to be satisfied by their bubble-point temperatures. Given the boiling temperatures of the pure materials and the compositions and boiling temperatures of binary and ternary azeotropes in the quaternary system, the method can sharply reduce the number of experiments because it requires only one experimental run for each ternary azeotrope. The method is applied to the acetone-methylacetatemethanol-hexane system in order to demonstrate the procedure of judgement.
