Method for Efficient Regeneration of Solvent Mixture: Extractive Heterogeneous-Azeotropic Distillation

Abstract

The fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries use large amounts of various organic solvents in their manufacturing processes. By reusing them, production costs can be significantly reduced. If we can regenerate waste solvent mixtures, we have the opportunity to reuse them in the production process or in other production processes. Our study illustrates an efficient regeneration process using the example of a four-component solvent mixture. Calculations were performed in a professional process simulator to demonstrate that the highly non-ideal Water-Ethyl Alcohol-Methyl Ethyl Ketone-Ethyl Acetate solvent mixture can be efficiently decomposed into azeotropic pairs and thus regenerated by the extractive heterogeneous-azeotropic distillation technique.