Sensitivity of viscosity Arrhenius parameters to polarity of liquids

Abstract

Several empirical and semi-empirical equations have been proposed in the literature to estimate the liquid viscosity upon temperature. In this context, this paper aims to study the effect of polarity of liquids on the modeling of the viscosity–temperature dependence, considering particularly the Arrhenius type equations. To achieve this purpose, the solvents are classified into three groups: nonpolar, borderline polar and polar solvents. Based on adequate statistical tests, we found that there is strong evidence that the polarity of solvents affects significantly the distribution of the Arrhenius-type equation parameters and consequently the modeling of the viscosity–temperature dependence. Thus, specific estimated values of parameters for each group of liquids are proposed in this paper. In addition, the comparison of the accuracy of approximation with and without classification of liquids, using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, shows a significant discrepancy of the borderline polar solvents. For that, we suggested in this paper new specific coefficient values of the simplified Arrhenius-type equation for better estimation accuracy. This result is important given that the accuracy in the estimation of the viscosity–temperature dependence may affect considerably the design and the optimization of several industrial processes.