Experimental Evaluation of Hybrid Distillation-Vapor Permeation Process for Efficient Ethanol Recovery from Ethanol-Water Mixtures

摘要

The energy demand of distillation-based systems for ethanol recovery and dehydration can be significant, particularly for dilute solutions [1]. An alternative separation process integrating vapor stripping with a vapor compression step and a vapor permeation membrane separation step, termed Membrane Assisted Vapor Stripping (MAVS), has been proposed [2]. A schematic diagram of the process is shown in Figure 1. The water-selective membrane separates the ethanol-water vapor into water-rich permeate and ethanol-enriched retentate vapor streams from which latent and sensible heat can be recovered. The objective of this work was to experimentally demonstrate the performance of a MAVS system and to compare the observed performance with chemical process simulation results using a 5 wt% ethanol aqueous feed stream as the benchmark.