2012
IMAACA 2012 Proceeding
Operation strategies to minimize methanol recovery in batch distillation of hydroalcoholic mixtures
Authors: Franco De Luca, Raúl Munizaga-Miranda, Claudio Gelmi, José Ricardo Pérez-Correa
Abstract
Methanol is a toxic compound produced during fermentation of fruit juices that normally contaminates a large variety of commercial distillates. This work focuses in applying dynamic simulation to explore operating conditions of a packed batch distillation column for reducing the concentration in the heart of methanol relative to ethanol, from a ternary mixture of water, ethanol and methanol. A non-equilibrium mass and energy balance model of the distillation process was derived and solved using the method of lines. The cooling rate in the partial condenser (time variable) and the head/heart cut time were the operating variables considered in this work. Simulations showed that, within the operating range studied, higher cooling rates and smaller cut times achieved lower methanol relative concentrations in the heart. Following a heuristic strategy, we reduced the relative concentration of methanol more than 15%, recovering 75% of the ethanol in the heart cut. Future work will consider an expanded operating range of the model, a more complete optimization problem and the application of global optimization techniques.
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