A Liquid Heat Capacity Limit for Organic Compounds

The heat capacity of liquids is an important property when designing any chemical process. While there have been numerous prediction methods and quantitative-structure-property relationships developed for predicting the liquid heat capacity, all of these include some degree of uncertainty. When making capital investments, reducing uncertainty as much as possible is desirable and profitable.

In this work, a limit for heat capacity was developed as a function of temperature and the reduced temperature. This limit has been tested for hundreds of species and works for all tested organic molecules. We discuss the basis of this limit, family exceptions, and the applicability in industry and process design.

Coupling this limit with traditional methods of estimating liquid heat capacity can give a chemical engineer a higher confidence in liquid heat capacity prediction and the tools to plan safer, more cost-effective processes.