Habitability of Hydrocarbon Worlds: Titan and Beyond

This work models the capillary condensation of Titan’s fluids in small pores, so that the order of magnitude of the resulting capillary pressure can be estimated more realistically. Capillary pressure holds liquid confined inside small pores. It must be overcome to release the liquid. Porous crust on Titan may have trapped liquid that seals the space below it analogous to capillary fringes near the surface or above oil/gas reservoirs in the depth on Earth. Instead of using the simple Kelvin this work applies the more generalized PCSAFT/Laplace equation in the modeling of capillary effects in nanopores.The modeling work on the solubility of organic compounds in relevant non-aqueous sol-vents was completed as planned. The results were presented as vapor-liquid equilibria, which were calculated using the PC-SAFT equation of state (EOS), in terms of the common (1) Henry’s constant to be used with Henry’ law in cases where the solubility in liquid is small and (2) liquid activity coefficients to be used with the modified Raoult’s law for vapor-liquid equilibria and can also be used for liquid-solid phase equilibria on the liquid side.