Separation of alcohols from organic liquid mixtures by pervaporation

Abstract

In the chemical industry, distillation is generally the preferred technique to separate a liquid mixture. However some liquid mixtures such as azeotropic mixtures, close-boiling hydrocarbons, and various isomers are difficult to separate by simple distillation. For the separation of these mixtures normally techniques like extractive or azeotropic distillation and liquid-liquid extraction are used. The relatively high energy consumption for these processes has encouraged the development of new, less energy-consuming separation processes such as pervaporation. In recent years, the pervaporation process was actively studied for the separation of organic-organic liquid mixtures. This may be considered as a major application area for pervaporation in the chamical processing industry. In this thesis, the separation of alcohols from non-polar solvents like toluene and methyl tert-butyl ether by pervaporation is discussed.