A Systematic Approach towards Synthesis and Design of Pervaporation‐Assisted Separation Processes

Abstract

While membrane processes like pervaporation are considered as key technology towards more sustainable separation processes, they are rarely considered in conceptual design. In order to enable an identification of promising applications, the current article proposes a systematic approach that covers the synthesis of pervaporation-assisted process variants and promotes the use of optimization-based methods for process analysis. It seeks to minimize and guide necessary experiments and includes competitive reference processes as well as further means for process intensification in the evaluation.

Process intensification by integration of distillation and vapor permeation or pervaporation - An academic and industrial perspective

“…The candidate membrane materials mentioned above can be evaluated based on the permeance of each component and the permselectivity, which can either be obtained based on a literature survey or by conducting own experiments. In addition, the results from the preliminary evaluation of the potential benefits for the coupling of membrane and distillation can be used to define a target value to screen a suitable membrane material, taking into account the performance of the membrane and an estimated membrane price per area [31].…”

“…Obtaining the azeotropic composition in the distillate stream, VP or PV allows for a final purification, especially if the azeotropic point occurs at high concentrations of the low boiler. The most prominent example among others is the dehydration of ethanol, which was subject to several studies [31,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48]. Some of these are summarized in the following.…”

“…Scharzec et al [31] also investigated ethanol dehydration by a PV-assisted distillation process to illustrate the usefulness of a systematic design approach. The proposed 5-step approach starts with the synthesis of different process configurations and an optimization-based evaluation of the minimum energy demand of these process configurations, assuming an ideal or nearly ideal membrane separation.…”

“…Regarding the optimization of distillation-VP hybrid processes, most early studies performed a simulation-based assessment by means of sensitivity analysis and single factor modifications, ignoring the interaction between the structure and operating parameters of the mixing process. Besides the already mentioned optimization-based methods [31,50,92], other methods for design optimization have been considered [93][94][95]. One possible solution proposed by Xiao et al [94] is to use the Response Surface Method (RSM), which is widely used to analyze the influence of multiple factors and their interactions.…”

Process Modeling, Simulation and Optimization: From Single Solutions to a Multitude of Solutions to Support Decision Making

“…Sometimes in case of missing information about physical properties to evaluate a concept, it is possible to estimate the parameters which would be necessary to make a process variant attractive and then to trigger subsequent testing of promising candidates. Examples of such methods are used for membranes (Micovic et al , Scharzec et al ) or solvent selections using continuous‐molecular targeting for integrated solvent and process design (Bardow et al , Stavrou et al , Austin et al ).…”