Desain dan Optimasi Distilasi Ekstraktif Tetrahidrofuran-Etanol Menggunakan Etilen Glikol sebagai Pelarut

Abstract

Recently, distillation technology is rapidly developing. Distillation is a process of separating some components in a mixtures based on differences in the boiling points of the component. Conventional distillation has disadvantage that is not applicable in separating azeotrope system. Azeotrope system means that the vapour emitted has the same composition as the liquid therefore it was very hard to separate the mixture. In this research, extractive distillation is used to separate tetrahydrofuran (THF) and ethanol.

Tetrahydrofuran and ethanol widely used as solvents in the chemical industry. In this method, an entrainer was needed to help the separation process. The entrainer that used in this study is ethylene glycol because of its best performance compared to the other entrainer. The goal from this study is to obtain the optimum design using Aspen Plus® such as the number of stage in each columns and location of feed/entrainer. The simulation results show that optimum design for THF-ethanol achieved when the number of first stage is 75, feed enter first column at 55^th stage and entrainer enter first column at 3^rd stage number. The number of stage in the 2^nd column is 10 and feed enter 2^nd column at 6^th stage