The effect of temperature on the liquid–liquid
equilibrium
(LLE) of the ternary system of {water (1) + acetic acid (2) + 4-methylpentan-2-one
(3)}, a recommended system for liquid–liquid extraction studies,
was investigated at (288.2, 313.2, and 333.2) K. The reliability of
the experimental tie line data was examined with the Othmer–Tobias
and the Hand correlations that represented an excellent agreement.
The distribution coefficient of acetic acid between organic and aqueous
phases increases significantly with temperature, more than 18 % with
low solute concentrations, and its value exceeds 1. Meanwhile, a high
separation factor within 3.27 to 43.50 was revealed to extract acetic
acid from aqueous phase at different temperatures. Higher separations
are relevant for low concentrations of acetic acid at 313.2 K. In
addition, the binary molecular interaction parameters for the nonrandom
two-liquid (NRTL) and the universal quasichemical (UNIQUAC) models
were estimated from the experimental results. Results show that these
models with their obtained parameters predict tie lines with root-mean
square deviation values of 0.0052 and 0.0245, respectively.