NRTL VLE Process Flowsheets & Simulations
Explore 4 validated, solved NRTL VLE simulation flowsheets in MaximaLabs — real components: ethanol, water, acetone, ethylene_glycol. Open any one directly in your browser.
Solved via: NRTL.
Ethanol–water distillation
An 8-stage column concentrating ethanol overhead toward the azeotrope (the headline demo).
4 unit ops • NRTL
227 3
View & openTray efficiency — real trays vs ideal stages
The same ethanol–water column solved with a Murphree vapor tray efficiency of 0.7 instead of ideal equilibrium stages. A real sieve/valve tray never reaches full vapor-liquid equilibrium — the vapor leaving it only partly approaches the equilibrium composition with the tray liquid, mixing in un-equilibrated vapor from the tray below: y = E·K·x + (1−E)·y_below (Murphree 1925). At E = 0.7 each of these 12 trays does 70% of an ideal stage's work, so the overhead ethanol is lower than an equilibrium column of the same tray count would predict — which is exactly why a real column needs more trays than a shortcut (ideal-stage) calculation says. Both HYSYS and Aspen RadFrac expose this per-tray efficiency; set murphree_efficiency back to 1.0 to recover the ideal-stage column. The efficiency auto-selects the component-flow Naphtali-Sandholm solver (the reduced-form solvers carry no explicit per-tray VLE row to apply an efficiency to).
4 unit ops • NRTL
140 0
View & openAcetone–water distillation
A 12-stage column recovers acetone overhead from a dilute aqueous solvent-recovery feed — a common industrial acetone/solvent-recycling duty.
4 unit ops • NRTL
232 0
View & openExtractive distillation (ethanol/water with ethylene glycol)
Near-azeotropic ethanol/water (85 mol% ethanol) can't be pushed past the 89 mol% azeotrope by ordinary distillation. A heavy, high-boiling entrainer (ethylene glycol) fed near the top of the column raises water's relative volatility enough to pull overhead ethanol past the azeotrope in one pass; a second column then strips water overhead from the glycol, regenerating it as the bottoms product. The classic extractive-distillation textbook case (Luyben, Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2006, 45, 4625).
7 unit ops • NRTL
254 0
View & open