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The robustness of the simulation of bioethanol concentration from sugarcane faces two major challenges: the presence of several minor components and the nonlinear behavior of vapor-liquid equilibrium (VLE) calculations. This work assesses the effect of simplifications to overcome these difficulties. From a set of seventeen substances, methanol, n-propanol, isobutanol, 2-methyl-1-butanol and 3-methyl-1-butanol were selected through the examination of the influence of each minor component on vapor-liquid equilibrium calculations of ethanol-water-third component systems. The selection procedure was based on Txy diagrams built using the modified Raoult's law. The influence of the ratio between the vapor phase fugacity coefficients and of the Poynting correction factor were verified. The accuracy of four correlations for vapor pressure was evaluated, and two functional-group activity coefficient models were scrutinized: the recent Functional-Segment Activity Coefficient (F-SAC) and the UNIFAC-Do model.

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An alternative technology for anhydrous ethanol production is extractive distillation with salts such as potassium acetate and calcium chloride. Salting out effects in hydroalcoholic systems may be modeled using group contribution methods such as UNIFAC. This work presents a comparison between these models in the background of anhydrous ethanol production. The evaluated system is a ternary one (water, ethanol and saltpotassium acetate or calcium chloride) whose experimental data were taken from the literature. Although the results depend on reparametrizations carried out for each piece of work, it was observed that the best models (with lower deviations) were the simplest ones, without accounting for medium range interactions or solvation.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the porosity behavior of dust cakes formed by phosphatic concentrate along filtration time. Filtration trials were performed for four different pressure drops. The fabric filter used as filter medium was a polyester felt. The dust cakes obtained were submitted to a hardening process and their images were acquired with the use of a SEM. The images generated by the SEM were analyzed by using an image analyzing program that supplied the cake porosity values. Porosity values were also estimated using Ergun’s modified equation. Results show that porosity presents higher values when calculated using the image analyzing program, but has the same behavior as the results found with Ergun’s equation. It was also observed that porosity is not constant during filtration; therefore it can be concluded that the dust cake is compressible.