It is a considerable challenge for
the phase behavior of chemical
separation industry to correlate and predict the vapor–liquid
equilibria (VLE) data of the binary and ternary systems containing
associating components because it is not known how these forms exist
in the experimental condition, such as homogeneous or heterogeneous
dimers or trimers, even polymers, and so on. Herein, VLE data for
the associating ternary system, water + ethanoic acid + propanoic
acid, and the three-constituent binary systems have been measured
by different liquid-phase compositions using a Fischer ebulliometer
at 101.33 kPa. The structures and distribution of various clusters
in water, ethanoic acid, and propanoic acid systems were fully optimized
at the B3LYP/6-31+G(d) level of theory using Gaussian 09. Then, we
developed a strategy that could calculate the liquid activity coefficients
by considering the distribution of the associating components in the
strong association systems. This method is called the discrete clusters
(DC) model, and, for comparison, Wilson, NRTL, and UNIQUAC models
were employed to correlate the VLE data for the three-constituent
binary systems. Also, the VLE data of the ternary system were estimated
from the DC, Wilson, NRTL, and UNIQUAC models without any additional
adjustment. Our DC model, which considered the explicit number of
various clusters, showed better agreement and a smaller deviation
from the experimental data. These VLE data derived from the DC model
can be used for the design and simulation of the distillation behavior
of the binary and ternary association systems.