Performance of Appended Wire Mesh Packing in Sieve Tray Distillation Column of Ethanol-Water System

Abstract

For the separation process in liquid-liquid mixture such as ethanol-water mixture, a sieve tray distillation column is an alternatif for affordable process and maintenance. However to date, this sieve tray system is still currently having a lower Murphee efficiency and smaller interfacial area, as compared to other tray system, that is, either a bubble cap or valve tray. Therefore it is of important to optimize the performance of sieve tray distillation by means of adding the wire mesh packing on that tray, as being the aim of the present study. This study is conducted by using a batch sieve tray distillation system, where the wire mesh packing is added on the third tray that is calculated from the top of the column, to avoid flooding inside the column. Here the resulting fermented molasses of containing a 10% volume of ethanol is used as a mixture distillation feed. The height of the wire mesh packing being studied is varied as 5 cm, 3 cm, and 2 cm. Our results showed that the Murphee efficiency obtained by the variation of the packing height of 5 cm, 3 cm, 2 cm and without packing were 73.5%, 66.27%, 56.86%, and 46.7% respectively, and were increased by subsequent level of the packing height. The corresponding hydrodynamic properties of this appended packing sieve tray distillation by means of the interfacial area were 11.88 cm 2 /cm 3 , 0.48 cm 2 /cm 3 , and 0.32 cm 2 /cm 3 , while its pressure drop measured from the water manometer height were 38.33 cm H 2 O/m, 30 cm H 2 O/m, 10 cm H 2 O/m for the packing height of 5 cm, 3 cm, 2 cm height, respectively. The increasing of the performance of appended packing sieve tray distillation by means of the Murphee efficiency is explained by the increasing of the interfacial area for vapour-liquid than the tray itself. This preliminary study is expected to be a pioneer study of strategy to increase the performance of conventional sieve tray distillation that is known as a kind of affordable distillation process.