Dissertations and Theses

Date of Award

2012

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Engineering

First Advisor

Jae W. Lee

Keywords

Reactive Distillation, Optimization, Entrainer

Abstract

(Ethyl Acetate) and IPA (Isopropyl Acetate) production systems are studied in terms of the feasibility analysis. It is not feasible to retrieve pure products by a simple reactive distillation for IPA production system because CCR (Critical Composition Region) covers the entire desired binary edge for IPA system. On the other hand, even though CCR does not cover the entire desired binary edge of the EA system completely, internal reflux ratio (IRR) analysis does not allow the production of the pure product via reactive distillation for EA production system. To overcome the restraints, external entrainers are utilized to take advantage of liquid-liquid split of the lowest boiling azeotrope between the entrainer and water, which is one of the desired products in esterification production systems. Dichloromethane and trichloromethane are the entrainers that are very toxic, yet still conventionally used for production of those esters mentioned above. In this paper, n-hexane and n-pentane are introduced as alternative entrainers because these are more environmentally benign chemicals and less toxic compared to dichloromethane and trichloromethane (chloroform).

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.