Use of a Decanter to Recover Solvent

and Cross Distillation Boundaries

with Aspen HYSYS®
Using Aspen HYSYS® V8.0

Revised: November 26, 2012

© 2012 Aspen Technology, Inc. All rights reserved

 Objectives

 Learn how to use a 3 phase separator to recover solvent

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 Background

 The decanter in this example is part of the heterogeneous

azeotropic distillation process where ethanol and water are
separated to produce anhydrous ethanol by using
cyclohexane as the solvent.

 The feed to this decanter is the distillate product from the

first column, which has a composition very close to the
ethanol/water/cyclohexane ternary azeotrope.

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 Key Teaching Points

 Since cyclohexane and water are immiscible, one of the outlet

streams from the decanter contains ~90% of cyclohexane and
is recycled back to the first column.

 The second outlet stream from the decanter has a composition

that is in a distillation region that is different from the
distillation region that the first column is operated in. The
second stream is feed to the second distillation column.

 Thus this decanter plays two roles:

– Recover the solvent.
– Cross distillation boundaries.

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 Recommended Further Exercises

 Use a decanter to separate a stream consisting of water,

n-butanol and 3-methylhexane with the following
specifications:
– Component flowrates: 50.03584, 0.0679802 and 78.66669 kmol/hr
respectively.
– Temperature: 30 °C.
– Pressure: 1 bar.

This is part of the solution to separate a 50:50 (on the mole basis) water/n-butanol
mixture with one column and one decanter. This decanter is used to accomplish what is
typically accomplished by the second column in an azeotropic distillation process to
obtain a pure product and recover the solvent.

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 Copyright

 Copyright © 2012 by Aspen Technology, Inc. (“AspenTech”). All

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