Abstract
Solvents purification mainly used in pharmaceutical field such as acetone and methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) were performed through hybrid silica membranes and from binary and multi-components mixtures. Two hybrid silica membranes—zirconia doped bis(triethoxysilyl)methane and bis(triethoxysilyl)ethane (BTESE)—were studied. Flux, permeance, and separation factor were evaluated depending on temperature, composition, and number of organic compounds in the feed. Dehydration tests of acetone were operated at 30 and 45 °C following by acetone and MEK purification at 50 °C from multi-components hydro-organic mixtures where hydrophilic compounds (water, methanol) but also hydrophobic (dichloromethane (DCM) and/or toluene) were present. Results showed that the presence of Zr nanoparticles affected flux and improved selectivity in the case of dehydration. Experiments related to acetone and MEK purification, revealed a mass transfer alteration and a decrease of performance, from 99 to 97 wt% and from 98 to 95 wt% respectively, when the number of compounds in the initial feed grown up and more precisely, in the presence of DCM and toluene thus highlighting a possible coupling effect.
Highlights
Organic compounds are mostly used as solvents in industrial fields such petrochemical, food industry, pharmaceutical, or water treatment due their physicochemical properties more suitable than water [1,2]
Membranes used for this study, hydrophilic hybrid silica membrane [38,39], were purchased from Céramiques Techniques Industrielles (CTI, Salindres, France)
When the acetone is replaced by the methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) as a solvent (Figure 11), it can be noticed a slow drop of global permeation with an initial total flux of 0.95 kg·h−1·m−2 due to the hydrophobic nature of MEK
Summary
Organic compounds are mostly used as solvents in industrial fields such petrochemical, food industry, pharmaceutical, or water treatment due their physicochemical properties more suitable than water [1,2]. It is necessary to treat them in order to reduce their atmospheric emissions [3,4] Regenerative processes such as distillation and liquid-liquid extraction [5,6] are a good alternative to destructive processes because they offer both environmental and economic benefits. Pervaporation aims to extract minority organic compounds (less than 10 wt%) from a liquid mixture through a non-porous membrane [7,8] This process requires less energy than conventional processes such as distillation that consumes up to 60%. Dehydration and purification of acetone and MEK (90 wt %) were performed through two hybrid silica membranes with different precursors, from multi-components mixtures at several temperature. The effects of temperature and concentration/number of organic species in the feed on purification performances were studied
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