The solubility of the major constituents of natural gas in ionic liquids (ILs) can be used to identify their potential for acid gas removal from a producing gas stream. We have developed models for the solubility of H₂S, CH₄, and C₂H₆ in ILs at typical conditions encountered in natural gas treatment. In this work, a conductor‐like screening model for realistic solvation was used to predict the activity coefficients for solutes in ILs and a cubic EOS was used for vapor‐phase corrections from ideality. Empirical correlations were developed to extrapolate solubilities where experimental data are not available at desired conditions; targeted in this study at 298.15 K and 2000 kPa. Over 400 possible ILs were ranked based on the higher selectivity of absorption of CO₂ and H₂S over CH₄ and C₂H₆. The best 15% (58) of promising ILs for sour gas treatment predominantly contain the anions BF₄, NO₃, and CH₃SO₄ and the cations N₄₁₁₁, pmg, and tmg. © 2013 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 59: 2993–3005, 2013

Seventy million tons of sulfur were produced worldwide in 2016. Much of the transportation and handling of molten sulfur require sulfur pumps which are challenging to operate due to the anomalous behavior of sulfur's liquid viscosity at temperatures near its λ-transition region. Sulfur's viscosity decreases from ca. 30 × 10−2 to ca. 7 × 10−2 Pa s when heating from the melt at T = 115 °C and then increases dramatically at T > 160 °C to a maximum of 93 000 × 10−2 Pa s at T = 187 °C. While the temperature of this viscosity transition is well known, no shear related information can be found in the literature and previous low-shear data do not address thermal hysteresis behavior (viscosity differences for cooling or heating) when sulfur is heated beyond 210 °C. This work is focused on reinvestigating the low-shear viscosity of molten sulfur which was initially studied by Bacon and Fanelli [J. Am. Chem. Soc. 65, 639–648 (1943)] and the effects of high-shear. The rheology of molten sulfur was studied using an An...