Environmental and climate problems encountered throughout the world are one of the problems to be solved, and green technologies and ecological sustainable development are of vital importance. Therefore, it is crucial to recover valuable components from waste streams originating from solvents, which are widely used in many branches of industry, by using appropriate methods to prevent both economic loss and environmental damage. Organic solvents are also used in the production processes of pharmaceutical products in the pharmaceutical industry and cause the emergence of waste streams consisting of a mixture of many organic and aqueous phases. There are many organic solvents commonly used in the pharmaceutical industry. Acetonitrile and methanol are among the organic solvents used in the pharmaceutical industry, and the acetonitrile-methanol system forms an azeotropic mixture that is difficult to separate by conventional distillation method. One of the preferred methods for separating a homogeneous azeotrope mixture such as acetonitrile-methanol solvent mixture is pressure swing distillation (PSD) method.
In this study, separation, and purification of acetonitrile-methanol mixture by two-column PSD was simulated using CHEMCAD program. The effect of feed concentrations on PSD separation performance was studied under different process conditions by using NRTL, Wilson and UNIQUAC thermodynamic models. As a result, the purities of the acetonitrile and methanol streams were obtained as 99 mol%. Additionally, design calculations for the sizing of the process equipments were carried out and compared with the simulation results. (This study was produced from the Master's Thesis of the first-ranking author at Yildiz Technical University, Graduate School of Science and Engineering. ORCID NO: 0009-0001-1298-1112, 0000-0002-2702-5991)
Anahtar Kelimeler: Simulation, Pharmaceutical, Acetonitrile-Methanol Mixture, Azeotrope, PSD
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