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Three-phase Process Flowsheets & Simulations

Explore 2 validated, solved Three-phase simulation flowsheets in MaximaLabs — real components: ethanol, water, n_hexane, benzene. Open any one directly in your browser.

Solved via: NRTL.

FEED
feed
dist
btms
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

17 0

View & open
FEED
feed
dist
btms
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

17 0

View & open

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