Calculation of critical points using a stochastic global optimization strategy

The determination of critical points in multicomponent mixtures is important for both theoretical and experimental issues in the context of Chemical Engineering and related areas. In this work, we introduce a new method to perform critical point calculations which is based on the Heidemann and Khalil's formulation and the stochastic global optimization method Simulated Annealing. Numerical performance (reliability and efficiency) of this strategy has been tested in the prediction of critical conditions of several multicomponent mixtures. Our results show that proposed method is generally robust for these calculations. However, the computational time is still significant for multicomponent systems.