Simulation and Optimization Study on the Pressure Swing Distillation of Methyl ethyl ketone-Water System

Abstract

In this study, modeling and optimization works were completed for the separation of 99.9 mol% of methyl ethyl ketone from water through a pressure-swing distillation process since the azeotropic composition varies very sensitively with the change of system pressure. PRO/II with PROVISION release 9.1 was used for the computer simulation and Wilson activity coefficient model was chosen as a modeling equation. A pressure-swing distillation process can be classified into a low-high pressure columns configuration and a high-low pressure columns configuration. In this work, each configurations were optimized for the minimization of steam consumptions, respectively and were compared.