Conceptual design of a distillation process for the separation of styrene monomer from polystyrene pyrolysis oil: experiment and simulation

This study presents experiments and modeling of batch distillation for the separation of styrene monomer from polystyrene pyrolysis oil. The bottoms obtained from the batch distillation was further fractionated applying a short-path distillation unit to study the separation efficiency of styrene from the polystyrene pyrolysis oil. GC-FID and GCMS were applied for the composition analysis of the polystyrene pyrolysis oil, distillate, and bottom fractions. Styrene monomer was obtained with a purity of 99.9 wt% from the batch distillation. The batch distillation was modeled employing the NRTL–RK thermodynamic model. A good agreement was achieved for the purity of styrene between the experimental analysis and model prediction. Additionally, a continuous distillation column was modeled for the scale-up of the process. Furthermore, viscosities and densities of the bottoms fraction were measured at the temperature range of 298–348 K.