Azeotropic Distillation Lab Report

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PV is coined as permeation and evaporation to achieve molecular-scale separation of liquids from their mixtures. While distillation utilizes differential boiling points of solvent mixtures to achieve the separation by supplying adequate thermal energy [48] .Usually, alcohols form azeotropes at lower water composition and separation of such mixtures can be achieved either by energy consuming azeotropic distillation, which involves use of foreign/third species as an entrainer or by adsorption technique involving the hassles of frequent regeneration.
In comparison with MD, PV has proved to be a cost-effective compliment due to its energy efficient and clean approach. In addition to this, PV is a mild process operating at low feed pressure and ambient temperature without need of additional chemicals for separation [50]. As a consequence, PV finds very useful application in separation of heat sensitive mixtures in food industries extensively. In principle, distillation can be replaced with PV, but this approach is not always economically feasible. Currently, PV process is more efficient in separation of minor components from the bulk solution. PV process finds viable in three main areas as given below: Dehydration of organic solvents Removal of dilute organic molecules from aqueous streams and Organic-organic …show more content…

For this reason, PV is different from other membrane-based separations. During the separation of a binary mixture, PV performance is dependent on the nature of membrane material, structure of the membrane, interaction of penetration through the membrane and intermolecular interaction between the permeating species. In this point of view, it is difficult to propose a complete model that can distinguish the details of mass transport process through PV membranes. There are two models to describe the mass transport in PV membranes viz., (i) the pore-flow model and (ii) the solution diffusion model.

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