Representation of activity coefficients of fundamental biochemicals in water by the UNIFAC model

The assignment of UNIFAC parameters has been newly examined to represent the activity coefficients of fundamental biochemicals in aqueous solutions containing sugars, imino acids, urea, amino acid salts, inorganic salts, and sugar salts.

In this work, several new groups have been introduced to represent the activity coefficients for many biochemicals with better accuracy. For sugars, a portion containing asymmetric carbon atoms in an aldohexose molecule was defined as a new group for many stereoisomers. In the case of electrolytes like amino acid salts, the Pitzer-Debye-Hückel term was added to the UNIFAC equation to take the long-range electrostatic interaction into account.

All new interaction parameters for the fundamental biochemicals have been determined from osmotic coefficient as well as activity coefficient data reported in the literature. The new parameters provided good calculated results for these biochemicals.

In addition, the activity coefficient data for the ternary systems water/amino acid/urea and water/amino acid/sucrose were used to determine the interaction parameters between the constituent groups of an amino acid and those of the second solute, urea or sucrose. The correlated results for the system containing urea were in satisfactory agreement with the literature data.