Vapor Liquid Equilibrium and Process Simulation Studies for the Extractive Distillation Process of Separating Tetrahydrofuran and Methanol Binary Mixtures

Abstract

Binary mixtures of tetrahydrofuran and methanol have an azeotropic point around 0.5 for the mol fraction of tetrahydrofuran at 100 kPa. In this work, process simulation of extractive distillation was performed for the separation of binary mixtures of tetrahydrofuran and methanol, using ethylene glycol as an extracting agent. Prior to the simulation, vapor liquid equilibria for the binary systems containing ethylene glycol were measured and modeled. According to the simulation results, the azeotropic mixture of tetrahydrofuran and methanol was separated with the extractive distillation process using ethylene glycol as the extracting agent.