Control of extractive distillation process for separating heterogenerous ternary azeotropic mixture via adjusting the solvent content

The existence of heterogeneous azeotrope of toluene-water and homogenous azeotrope of toluene-methanol makes it difficult to separate the toluene-methanol-water mixture. Two methods of three column extractive distillation and two column extractive distillation using decanter were explored to separate the ternary azeotrope. Diethylene glycol and N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone were used as heavy solvent in the two processes, respectively. The UNIQUAC...