Application of Mechanical Vapor Recompression to Acetone – Methanol Separation

Abstract

Abstract-This paper proposed a novel integrated design of azeotropic mixtures distillation process based on mechanical vapor recompression (MVR). The extractive distillation of acetone -methanol binary system that forms a homogeneous minimum -boiling azeotrope was studied. Based on the simulation result, the total energy consumption of the proposed sequence is 62% less than the existing extractive distillation configuration.Index Terms-Mechanical vapor recompression, MVR, heat integration, azeotropic distillation, extractive distillation.

Thermodynamic assessment of MVR implementation in multistage evaporation plants

“…By using the empirical correlations, Eqs. (6) and (7), and the enthalpies of external steam, it was possible to associate the external steam consumption with process variables that are measured in the industrial plant, such as the pressure in each evaporation stage. The specific energy consumption (SEC mass ), defined in Eq.…”

“…The empirical polynomial forms obtained for H liquor , BPE and x NaCl are expressed in Eqs. (6)(7)(8). It is worth highlighting that these equations are given by the company that sold the equipment to Carbocloro.…”

“…[3] performs a theoretical evaluation of the process not considering the solute and solvent. Another issue in the literature is the analysis and optimization of heat exchangers or some specific processes [4][5][6][7][8][9][10], and eventually, some specific applications such as a biorefinery industry [11,16] and caustic soda solution in water [12,13]. The main concern of the literature is related to saltwater evaporation to obtain drinking water since this system is the most usual and a competitor with osmotic salt water purification [9,14,15,17,19].…”

“…Taking into account the high-energy demand by the units, any effort to decrease the steam consumption, hence the energy consumption, or increase its efficiency can be significant [3]. The effort should be in either operational modifications [4,5] or design modifications such as the use of mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) [6][7][8][9], thermal vapor recompression (TVR) [10] or thermal integration with other processes in the industrial site [1,[6][7][8][9][10]. An additional alternative is to change the configuration of the evaporation unit by adding more effects, which results in a decrease in steam consumption proportional to the increase in the number of effects.…”

“…The set of nonlinear equations that mathematically represent the system consisting of the mass and energy balances plus equations describing liquid-vapor equilibrium has been the focus of papers dedicated to solution techniques for systems with different configurations [10,11]. More recently, studies have been published on the optimization of energy consumption and investment cost [3,[12][13][14], exergy analysis [7,10,[14][15][16][17] and evaluation of vapor recompression as an energy-saving alternative [6,7,9,14,17,19]. However, besides the importance of chlor-alkali industries, there have been relatively few studies published dedicated to the evaporation step of the process, e.g., [6,12].…”