Abstract
In the development stage of the azeotropic distillation processes, screening potential entrainers that make separation feasible is generally acknowledged to be very difficult. If the number of the candidates of entrainer can be reduced beforehand, the increase in efficiency of development and a design of the azeotropic distillation processes is expectable. In this article, an attempt is made to develop a system for screening potential entrainers used in azeotropic distillation processes. The system is built on the Internet World Wide Web using Active Server Pages against the background of progress of information processing technology and improvement of transmission speed in recent years. We call the system "Web Based System (WBS)". The system has the following merits: (1) the system can present entrainers that satisfy the necessary conditions to make separation feasible through azeotropic distillation and the corresponding feasible process configurations derived from them: (2) the system requires only qualitative information, such as the existence of azeotropes and the order of boiling points of pure materials and azeotropes. Such information can be supplied from azeotropic database. (3) registering the azeotropic data experimented by users (researchers and developers) from input form of the system, it becomes possible to enrich the databases of the system and the further development of a system can be expected: (4) users can use the system easily using a standard web browser: (5) it is not necessary to install the system into users PCs, so the securities of the system and users PCs are protected.
