Abstract
Ethyl acetate and n-hexane are two widely used organic solvents in chemical and pharmaceutical industries; however, separation of their mixtures is very challenging due to the formation of a minimum boiling azeotrope. This study proposes and develops an extractive distillation (ED) process for efficiently separating the mixture of ethyl acetate and n-hexane using N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone as entrainer. Subsequently, vapor recompression heat pump (VRHP) is used to further improve the thermal efficiency of the developed ED process. Simulation results revealed that the VRHP assisted ED (VRHP-ED) process is generally better than the conventional ED process in terms of lower operating and total annual costs, and also higher thermal efficiency. Compared to azeotropic distillation and heat integrated pressure-swing distillation studied in a recent paper, VRHP-ED process can save 93.78% and 82.67% of operating cost, respectively. Finally, two alternative control strategies were developed and assessed for VRHP-ED operation, demonstrating that the control scheme with feedforward structure exhibits better performance for the operation of the challenging VRHP-ED process than that without feedforward structure, for handling large feed flow rate and feed composition disturbances.
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