Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Technical View
Published in Eberhard Lucke, Edgar Amaro Ronces, Leveraging Synergies Between Refining and Petrochemical Processes, 2020
Eberhard Lucke, Edgar Amaro Ronces
Methanol Methyl methacrylate (MMA) – Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) – used in unbreakable glass.Formaldehyde – Phenolic resins – used in thermal insulation– Polyurethane – used in home furnishings and sports equipment.Methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) – used as additive in the gasoline poolOther chemical intermediatesUse of methanol as fuel or as precursor to fuel (in discussion).
Design and optimization for the separation of a ternary methyl methacrylate-methanol-water mixture to save energy
Published in Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 2020
Xiaoxin Gao, Mengyuan Chen, Tianyu Wang
Methyl methacrylate (MMA) is an important chemical raw material and intermediate, which is widely used in various fields such as plexiglass, coatings, plastics, optical lenses, and optical fibers (Godiya et al. 2019; Van Ravensteijn et al. 2019). The worldwide demand for MMA is ever increasing at an average annual rate of 30% (Haiyan and Bin 2016). However, challenges still remain in MMA production, which inevitably affects industrial development and production (Abidin et al. 2020). During MMA production the MMA-methanol-water mixture can form a heterogeneous azeotropic system, which includes MMA/methanol and methanol/water that are infinitely miscible, whereas MMA and water are only partially miscible. Distillation is the most common method for separating such mixtures in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry. However, it is difficult to effectively separate azeotropic or near-boiling mixtures via conventional distillation, such pressure-swing distillation, extractive distillation (Gerbaud et al. 2019), and heterogeneous azeotropic distillation (Pla-Franco et al. 2019; Qasim, Shin, and Park 2018). Yang et al. reported a conceptual design and optimization of energy-saving and sustainable reactive/pressure-swing distillation process for the separation ternary mixture tetrahydrofuran/ethanol/water with three azeotropes. Zhu et al. proposed a process with no reflux rate (R) of distillate product using heterogeneous extractive distillation (HED) for the separation of close boiling compounds. Fan et al. proposed a systematic method for the determination of optimum combination of self-heat recuperation technology (SHRT) and heterogeneous azeotropic distillation (HAD). Extractive distillation is an important separation technology, where the selected extractant is incompatible with the solvent in the original solution, and the solubility of the solute is much greater than that of the original solvent. Due to the vast choice of extractants, it is widely used in the separation of binary or multiple azeotropes in the chemical industry (Aniya et al. 2018). In the case of pressure-swing distillation, the composition of the azeotropic mixture has a significant pressure change to achieve separation; hence, it is only suitable for pressure-sensitive mixtures (Ghuge, Mali, and Joshi 2017). Azeotropic distillation separates mixtures in cooperation with azeotropic agents. However, this system is limited by many steady state and high-energy requirements (Zhao et al. 2018). By calculating the energy consumption of the entire separation process, the heat load of the reboiler of the rectification column and condenser, the extractive distillation process is an ideal process to potentially completely separate heterogeneous azeotropic mixtures (Li et al. 2018a; Uddin et al. 2018). Yang et al. proposed a three-column pressure-swing distillation system design and control program to study the separation of a multi-azeotrope ternary non-ideal system. The goal of minimizing TAC was achieved by optimization of the rectification column parameters. Yang et al. proposed a novel double-thermally coupled ternary extractive distillation (DTCTED) for separation of azeotropic system benzene/toluene/cyclohexane to achieve energy-saving and emissions reduction.