Dividing wall columns for heterogeneous azeotropic distillation

Journal article, 2015

The aim of this work is to implement heterogeneous azeotropic distillation schemes in a dividing wall column (DWC) for a feed mixture of water (W), acetic acid (HAC) and an organic component (X). The original design makes use of X to act as an entrainer to facilitate the separation of water and HAC, and we also propose a DWC design based on this idea. This DWC design reduces the capital cost, but the energy usage is almost unchanged. To achieve energy savings and further reductions in capital costs, we need to use a Petlyuk DWC. We introduce isobutyl acetate (IBA) as an additional entrainer for the Petlyuk DWC, and achieve energy savings of about 20%.