High pressure vapor-liquid equilibria in the system acetone-methanol-water

Abstract

In the field of synthetic liquid fuels and organic chemicals there is considerable industrial interest in Fischer-Tropsch-type processes for the production of liquid hydrocarbons and various organic chemicals as by-products. Processes developed primarily for the production of oxygenated organic chemicals by partial oxidation of paraffin hydrocarbons are also in commercial operation. For both processes, recovery and purification of the product constituents by fractional distillation constitute a major problem. Of primary importance to solutions of the problem are the availability of reliable vapor-liquid equilibrium data on the various systems encountered. The need for suitable data is increased by the fact that practically all existing vapor-liquid equilibrium data are for atmospheric pressure only, whereas actual distillation operations are most frequently conducted at pressure above one atmosphere because of favorable economics, design, operations, and control requirements. It is obvious that reliable data at pressure other than one atmosphere and in particular, superatmospheric data are needed. More fundamentally important however, is the need for complete and extended data to evaluate and test the applicability of proposed correlations of the vapor-liquid data. Such extension and correlation involve the change of vapor-liquid equilibria with temperature or pressure, the determination of these data with a minimum of experimental effort, and the extension of binary data into reliable ternary data. Of the numerous oxygenated components produced by the aforementioned processes, acetone, methanol, and water constitute the major portion of the crude products. Binary and ternary systems containing these components have been evaluated and the results reported herein