Study Of Pervaporation Separation Transport And Simulation Calculation Of Pervaporation-Esterification Coupling Process

Pervaporation is unique among membrane separations, involving a change of phase to achieve separation, which to be used in the separation of liquid mixtures, especially to remove water from organic solution or volatile organic compounds from aqueous solutions. It has to save energy and operate conveniently comparing with traditional separation technique, for example, distillation; furthermore pervaporation is applied appropriately to remove trace compounds as well as azeotropic mixtures. The use of membrane in chemical reaction process is attracting much attention. The potential applications of pervaporation in reaction are being recognized, especially in esterification. Since separation membranes permit selective permeation of a component from a mixture, membrane can help enhance the conversion of thermodynamically or kinetically limited reactions through controlled removal of one or more reactant or product species from the reaction mixtures.In this study, PVA membrane was used in removal of water from n-butyl acetate/water, n-butanol/water and acetic acid /water binary mixtures by pervaporation separation. The effects of some technique parameter, for example feed concentration and temperature on the separation properties such as permeation flux, separation factor and pervaporation separation index (PSI) were studied. The results showed that the membrane preferentially permeates water over the organic compounds, and its permselectivity follows the order of water>acetic acid>n-butanol>n-butyl acetate, moreover such membrane was especially selective to water permeation. The temperature dependence of permeation flux for binary mixtures was expressed by the Arrhenius-type relation and activation energies were calculated for binary mixtures through...