Impact on the effect of acetic acid in its aqueous forms on environments and its separations methods

Abstract

Acetic acid is one among the top twenty commodity used in various industrial process. Removal of acetic acid in its aqueous forms is an important problem, it cannot be discarded directly to the environment because of its acidity nature. At the same time if its recovered in effective manner, it's a value added to that industry. The high concentration of acetic acid in its water phase will affect the animals and plants life. The separation of acetic acid from its aqueous phase is a challenging process because of the formation of azeotrope conditions. The concentration of acetic acid leaving in aqueous forms will vary from low level to high level. Solvent extraction is one of the promising techniques. The efficiency of solvent extraction mainly depends on solvent which is chosen for the extraction. The current study mainly focused on the extraction of acetic acid from aqueous phase using combination of two solvents (dual solvents). The two phase extraction of the system water-acetic acid-(ethyl acetate+methyl tert butyl ether) has been studied using the solvents at room temperature at five different solvent ratios of 0:1, 0.28:0.72, 0.54:0.46, 0.78:0.22, and 1:0 (EA: MTBE) (Ethyl acetate+Methyl tert butyl ether) (mole fraction). The solubility curve was determined by cloud point procedure where the mixer-settler analysis the two-phases used for determining the tie-line data. The ability of the dual solvent and its ratios were studied with determining distribution coefficient as well as the separation factor. The accuracy of the tie-line data was checked by Othmer-Tobias correlation. The NRTL model was used to determine the simulated data with the RMSD value for the different solvent ratio of 0:1, 0.28:0.72, 0.54:0.46, 0.78:0.22, and 1:0 were obtained as 0.0122, 0.0338, 0.0272, 0.0463 and 0.0723 respectively. The dual solvent MTBE and EA obtained the slightly better distribution coefficient, especially at the solvent ratio of 0.28:0.72 (EA: MTBE).