The evolution of process design and control for ternary azeotropic separation: Recent advances in distillation and future directions

Abstract

The presence of the azeotropes in the binary mixture has resulted in the individual components cannot be effectively separated using the conventional distillation technique. Therefore, several special distillation techniques have been devised that includes conventional extractive distillation (ED), pressure swing distillation (PSD), azeotropic distillation (AD), thermally coupled extractive distillation (TCED), extractive-dividing wall column (EDWC), and side-stream extractive distillation (SSED). These techniques have recently been extended to the separation of ternary azeotropic mixture, with one of the earliest design works published in 2015. At present, there has been a large number of publications available for this topic with the absence of review paper that captures the essential knowledge and insights in these studies. Further, majority of these studies were conducted simultaneously by different groups at different geographical locations, which resulted in the lack of synchronisation between different studies for the same separation mixture. This review paper therefore puts together all these studies conducted in between 2015 and 2021 so that the link between them becomes apparent. These studies were group according to their ternary mixture and the existing gaps were highlighted as recommendation for future works. This review also provides several potential insights as recommendation for future studies on the separation of ternary azeotropic mixture.