There are very few papers in the
open literature studying the design
of extractive distillation system for separating maximum-boiling mixtures.
Using the knowledge of the curvature of the distillation boundary
existing in such systems with a heavy entrainer, feasibility of separation
can easily be determined by plotting the ternary diagram with distillation
boundary and material balance lines of the studied system. In this
paper, an industrially important phenol/cyclohexanone separation system
is thoroughly studied to obtain an energy-efficient two-column extractive
distillation process for this separation task. A heavy entrainer,
triethylene glycol (TEG), is found to be an effective entrainer for
the development of the proposed system. Binary and ternary vapor–liquid
equilibrium experiments were conducted to obtain the binary model
parameters of TEG-phenol and TEG-cyclohexanone pairs from regression.
With confidence of the simulation investigations, it is found that
economics of the resulting heat-integrated extractive distillation
system proposed in this paper can significantly cut the total annual
cost by 65.8% and also cut the total operating cost by 71.1%, as compared
to that of an existing separation system in the open literature.
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