A Critical Analysis of the Hand and Othmer-Tobias Correlations

Carniti, P., Cori, L. and Ragaini, V., 1978. A Critical Analysis of the Hand and Othmer-Tobias Correlations. Fluid Phase Equilibria, 2: 39-47. The Hand (H) and Othmer-Tobias (OT) correlations are extensively analyzed on 83 aqueous and 26 non-aqueous ternary systems. Twenty solutropic systems are also included. 65% and 58% of the systems give a linear correlation coefficient greater than 0.99 for H and OT respectively. An analysis of the sensitivity to systematic or random errors demonstrates the H correlation to be highly insensitive. A remarkable insensitivity, although not completly for some systematic errors, is also demonstrated for the OT correlation. However there is sufficient proof that they are both unsuitable as a check of experimental data, even though they are used for this purpose. The relation, not necessarily linear, derived from the H correlation, log(x32/x22) vs. log(x31/x11) is useful in locating the plait point.