Rigorous analysis of non-ideal solubility of sodium and copper chlorides in water vapor using Pitzer-Pabalan model

Gaseous mixtures of water vapor and neutral molecules of salt (e.g., NaCl, CuCl etc.) can be highly non-ideal due to a strong attractive interaction between salt and water molecules. In particular, this can result in high solubility of salts in water vapor and a strong dependence of solubility on vapor pressure. The analysis of salt solubility in water vapor can be done using the Pitzer-Pabalan model, which is based on the thermodynamic theory of imperfect gases. The original Pitzer-Pabalan work demonstrated that one can reproduce experimental data for NaCl solubility in vapor. No analysis was performed on the reliability of their original fits, which we believe has contributed to the lack of applications of the Pitzer-Pabalan model despite the apparent success of the original paper. In this work, we report our recent progress in developing a rigorous fitting procedure to parameterize the Pitzer-Pabalan model using experimental data. Specifically, we performed fitting of the experimental results obtained elsewhere for NaCl and CuCl. We investigate the degree of underfitting/overfitting and the sensitivity of the fitting quality to variations in the resulting fitting parameters. The results, as represented by the thermodynamic parameters describing the energetics of formation of salt-bearing water clusters, were successfully benchmarked against Gaussian 16 ab initio quantum chemistry calculations. The resulting rigorous fitting procedure presented here can now be applied to other systems.