Phase Behavior and Thermodynamic Model Parameters in Simulations of Extractive Distillation for Azeotrope Separation

Extractive distillation (ED) processes for separating ternary mixtures of benzene-cyclohexane-toluene with dimethyl formamide (DMF) and N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) were studied using Aspen Plus and PRO/II simulators. The Aspen Plus built-in binary interaction parameters for the toluene-DMF, benzene-NMP and cyclohexane-NMP systems resulted in inaccurate phase behavior calculations. The vapor-liquid equilibrium (VLE) for the three binary systems was regressed to illustrate the importance of using accurate model parameters. The obtained binary interaction parameters described the phase behavior more accurately compared with the built-in binary interaction parameters in Aspen Plus. In this study, the effects of the regressed and built-in binary interaction parameters on the ED process design are presented. The total annual cost (TAC) was calculated to further illustrate the importance of the regressed binary interaction parameters. The results show that phase behavior and thermodynamic model parameters should receive more attention during the research and development of ED processes.