Experimental and Theoretical Study of Multicomponent Batch Distillation

We present in this talk several important aspects of multi-component batch distillation.

These later include:

• Experimental implementation and results of a simple multi-component batch distillation,
• Theoretical prediction of temperature and composition evolution with time, and
• Liquid-vapor equilibrium calculations of ternary mixtures, including residue curves computations.

The selected multi-component mixture is composed of chloroform, acetone and methanol. This mixture is particularly interesting because it has several distillation boundaries and up to four azeotropes. During the simple batch distillation experiment, temperature of the vapor phase is measured and both the initial and final compositions are determined using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). These experimental results are then compared to the theoretical calculations based on two approaches: (1) mass and energy balance approach (i.e, MESH equations) and (2) residue curve.