Modelling of Organophilic Pervaporation for Separation of Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol Mixture

The motivation of the research is based on separation problem from fermentation industry, that is Acetone-Butanol-Ethanol solvent residue removal from its aqueous solutions. Pervaporation is a novel, promising technology for the separation of complex, azeotropic mixtures. Within pervaporation membrane category, organophilicpervaporation was investigated. In this work, laboratory experiments were performed with commercially available test membranes at different temperatures conditions. The separation factor and total organic fluxes were determined as well. It was found that, the separation factor and fluxes were inversely proportional to the feed butanol concentration. The laboratory results were consistent with literature studies. Using partial fluxes, semiempiricalpervaporation models were fitted. Exponentially improved model version of Rautenbachpervaporation model (Szilagyi and Toth, 2020) was investigated in the case of binary mixtures. The aim of this work was to extend the observations of organophilicpervaporation model to more complex mixture. It can be observed that, the exponentially Rautenbach model describes accurately the transport process of organophilicpervaporation. Thus, it is possible to implement further studies in process simulator environment.