Pemisahan Campuran THF-Etanol Menggunakan Extractive Dividing Wall Column (E-DWC)

Distillation is a physical process for the separation of liquid mixtures based on differences in the boiling points of the constituent components. However, simple/usual/conventional distillation not applicable to separating azeotrope system. Therefore, pressure swing distillation, azeotropic distillation, and extractive distillation are some common methods for azeotrope separation. Tetrahydrofuran (THF) and ethanol are widely used as solvents in the chemical industry, however, both THF and ethanol are an azeotrope system. Extractive distillation method should be suitable for this separation. The separation process using extractive distillation used ethylene glycol as their entrainer. This separation method may be suitable for separating THF and ethanol mixture, but the energy consumption was too high. A modified column studied in this work to solve the problem, a dividing wall column (DWC) used to give a wall in a column to reduce the energy consumption and cost saving. The aim/goal of this study is to achieve cheaper/smaller capital cost using Aspen Plus® to do the simulation. The dividing wall column in the simulation approached using three columns that represents the dividing wall column. The result of the simulation gives smaller capital cost by reducing it for 1.36% from conventional distillation. Total annual cost (TAC) obtained from the simulation was $1,271,405.15/year with three years of the payback period