Re: A column to separate an Acetone-Methanol mixture
The objective of the project was to optimize the design of a column used to process a supply stream containing 35 percent acetone at 30oC. The optimized design should turn out a distillate product containing 0.75 mole fraction of acetone and 0.0010 fraction of bottoms acetone. The outcome of the experiment produced a distillate product containing 0.0079 molar fraction of acetone.
The molar fraction of acetone in the first inlet stream was determined to be 0.14 lbmol/min. Also, the total flow rate of the second inlet stream and the total gas flow rate were determined to be 61.84 lbmoles/min and 45.53 lb/min respectively. The diameter of the tower was determined to be 1.96 ft with a cross sectional area of 3 ft2. The outlet stream 2 containing vapor with acetone and air produced an acetone molar flow rate of 0.0095 lbmol/min and air molor flow rate of 1.19 lbmol/min. A liquid containing an acetone molar percentage of 5 and water molar percentage of 95 was used in outlet stream 1. Also, an inlet stream 2 containing 0.02 molar percentage of acetone and 99.98 molar percentage of water was used and the total molar flow rate of inlet stream 2 was determined to be 3.434 lbmoles/min.
The optimized model to process a feed stream containing acetone exhibited a slight variation from the expected results due to experimental errors. While the model was to produce a distillate product containing 0.75 percent mole fraction of acetone, it produced 0.79 percent mole fraction of acetone. The results indicate that the model was successfully optimized since it exceeded the targeted product output.
