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Decanter Process Flowsheets & Simulations

Explore 3 validated, solved Decanter simulation flowsheets in MaximaLabs — real components: ethanol, water, n_hexane, benzene, 1_butanol. Open any one directly in your browser.

Solved via: NRTL.

FEED
feed
dist
btms
Qc
Qr
COL
vap
liq1
liq2
COND
Ethanol
Organic
Aqueous
VENT
Reference model (ChemSep)

Heterogeneous azeotropic distillation

An n-hexane entrainer carries water overhead as a ternary heteroazeotrope; the condensed overhead splits in a three-phase flash into an organic layer and an aqueous layer, while dry ethanol leaves in the bottoms — the three-phase separation ordinary distillation cannot do.

7 unit ops • NRTL

223 0

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FEED
feed
dist
btms
Qc
Qr
COL
vap
liq1
liq2
COND
Ethanol
Organic
Aqueous
VENT
Reference model (literature)

Ethanol-water-benzene column (multiplicity study)

The ethanol/water/benzene heteroazeotropic column — one of the most-studied systems in distillation modeling for exhibiting multiple steady states at the same specifications (Magnussen et al. 1979; Prokopakis & Seider, AIChE J. 29, 49, 1983; Venkataraman & Lucia, Comput. Chem. Eng. 12, 55, 1988). Benzene entrains water overhead as a heteroazeotrope, decanted into organic/aqueous layers, leaving dry ethanol in the bottoms. This flowsheet reports the single steady state the MaximaLabs solver converges to from its initial guess — it does not sweep initial guesses to map the full multiplicity map the cited studies performed.

7 unit ops • NRTL

223 0

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FEED
feed
dist
btms
Qc
Qr
COL
Water Bottoms
Decanter
Butanol Product
Aqueous Reflux
Reference model (Luyben 2008)

Butanol/water separation via LLE-assisted distillation

Butanol and water form a heterogeneous azeotrope: overhead vapor condenses into two liquid phases (a butanol-rich organic layer and a water-rich aqueous layer). A decanter splits the condensed reflux by liquid-liquid equilibrium, returning the water-rich phase to strip more butanol while the organic phase is drawn as a near-pure butanol product — the phase split does the separating work an ordinary VLE column can't past the azeotrope. Luyben et al., Energy Fuels 2008, 22, 4249.

6 unit ops • NRTL

223 0

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