Separation Of Ethylene Glycol Mixtures Via Reactive Distillation And Simulation On This Process

An innovative multi-column reactive distillation process was put forward for separation of ethylene glycol mixtures including ethylene glycol,propylene glycol and 1,2-butanediol,in which differences in chemical equilibrium and chemical kinetics between diols were taken advantage of in order to obtain pure ethylene glycol.In this paper,thermodynamic data for this system was obtained by Consulting literatures related to it and appropriate thermodynamic property method was chosen according to data above.Due to strongly non-ideal liquid in these mixtures,activity should be made use of to calculate the reaction kinetics.However,there is no available model for this situation.Therefore,the reaction kinetics of acetalization was studied via experiments and the apparent kinetics equation was correlated with these data from experiments.At the meantime,it also prove that this solution is feasible and advantageous.The purification indeed benefits from the reaction equilibrium and the reaction kinetics.A kinetic subroutine was written by using Fortran language as an attachment to Aspen Plus for simulating the reactive distillation process based on the rate-based model.The influence of parameters related to the reactive distillation was investigated and the optimization conditions are acquired so as to ensure the purity and the yield of ethylene glycol.