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A comprehensive set of single-component and binary isotherms were collected for ethanol/water adsorption into the siliceous forms of 185 known zeolites using grand-canonical Monte Carlo simulations. Using these data, a systematic analysis of ideal/real adsorbed-solution theory (IAST/RAST) was conducted and activity coefficients were derived for ethanol/water mixtures adsorbed in different zeolites based on RAST. It was found that activity coefficients of ethanol are close to unity while activity coefficients of water are larger in most zeolites, indicating a positive excess free energy of the mixture. This observation can be attributed to water/ethanol interactions being less favorable than water/water interactions in the single-component adsorption of water at comparable loadings. The deviation from ideal behavior can be highly structure-dependent but no clear correlation with pore diameters was identified. Our analysis also demonstrates the following: (1) accurate unary isotherms in the low-loading regime are critical for obtaining physically sensible activity coefficients; (2) the global regression scheme to solve for activity model parameters performs better than fitting activity models to activity coefficients calculated locally at each binary state point; and (3) including the dependence on adsorption potential offers only a minor benefit for describing binary adsorption at the lowest fugacities. Finally, the Margules activity model was found incapable of capturing the non-ideal adsorption behavior over the entire range of fugacities and compositions in all zeolites, but for conditions typical of solution-phase adsorption, RAST predictions using zeolite-specific or even bulk Margules parameters provide an improved description compared to IAST. 

As molecular modeling and simulation techniques become increasingly important sources of thermophysical property and phase equilibrium data, the ability to assess the robustness of that data becomes more critical. Recently, the use of the compressibility factor (Z) has been suggested as a metric for testing the quality of simulation data for vapor−liquid equilibria (VLE). Here, we analyze predicted VLE data from the transferable potentials for phase equilibria (TraPPE) database and show that, apart from data entry or typographical errors, Z will always be well-behaved in Gibbs ensemble Monte Carlo (GEMC) simulations even when the simulations are not sufficiently equilibrated. However, this is not true for grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations. When the pressure is calculated from the internal forces, then pressure and density are strongly correlated for the vapor phase and, for GEMC simulations, it is recommended to treat Z as an instantaneous mechanical property. From analysis of the TraPPE VLE data, we propose a complementary metric based on the predicted vapor pressures at three neighboring temperatures and their deviation from a local Clausius−Clapeyron fit.