AbstractsChemistry

The separation of aqueous and organic mixtures with thermal separation processes is an important and challenging task in the chemical industry. Rising prices for energy, stricter environmental regulations and the increasing demand for high purity chemicals are the main driving forces to find alternative solutions to common separation technologies such as distillation and absorption. These are mostly too energy consumptive and can show limited separation performance, especially when applied to close boiling or azeotropic mixtures. Pervaporation can overcome these thermodynamic limitations and requires less energy because only the separated components need to be evaporated. This separation technology is already well established for the production of anhydrous solvents, but not yet widely distributed in the chemical and petrochemical industry due to some crucial challenges, which are still to overcome. Besides the need of high selective membranes, the development of membrane modules adapted to the specific requirements of organoselective pervaporation needs more research effort. Furthermore, only few modelling and simulation tools are available, which hinders the distribution of this process in industrial scale. In this work, these issues are addressed in a combined approach. In close collaboration with our cooperation partners, a novel membrane module for organophilic pervaporation is developed. A novel technology to manufacture high selective polymeric pervaporation membranes is applied to produce a membrane for an industrially relevant organic-organic separation task. A three step modelling approach ranging from a shortcut and a discrete to a rigorous model is developed and implemented in a user interface. A hydrophilic and an organophilic membrane are characterised for the separation of a 2-butanol/water mixture in a wide range of feed temperature and feed concentration in order to establish a generally valid description of the membrane performances. This approach is implemented in the three developed models to simulate the novel membrane module in industrial scale. The simulations are compared to the results of pilot scale experiments conducted with the novel membrane module. Good agreement between simulated and experimental values is reached.