Abstract
Fusel oil is a mixture obtained as a side cut during ethanol distillation, mainly composed of i-amyl alcohol, water, ethanol, isobutanol, and other alcohols. Currently, fusel separation into the constitutive alcohols is accomplished by batch or continuous distillation involving different columns in an energy-intensive process. Moreover, fusel oil presents a particular thermodynamic behavior projected in several azeotropes, making the purification of fusel oil a challenging process. In this work is proposed a novel distillation scheme to purify isoamyl alcohol from other fusel alcohols by using a dividing wall column scheme. In order to determine the benefits of using such intensified technology, a comparison with the conventional scheme was carried out. In order to accurately represent the thermodynamic equilibrium, data for phase equilibrium was needed to the correctly design of the purification process. Both, the traditional distillation scheme and the dividing wall column were modeled using Aspen Plus and optimized by using a hybrid stochastic algorithm. Results indicate that the dividing wall column is not only more efficient in term of energy intensity (2785 kJ/kg Amyl alcohol) against (3497 kJ/Kg Amyl alcohol) the conventional scheme, but also it offers large economic savings compared with the conventional scheme (27 % savings).
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