Investigation on energy-saving extractive distillation for recovering ethanol and 1,4-dioxane from wastewater

Energy-saving extractive distillation for separating ethanol and 1,4-dioxane from the industrial effluent is proposed. From the point of COSMO-SAC model and thermodynamic insights, appropriate entrainer is screened. Ethylene glycol (EG) is chosen in direct extractive distillation process. Subsequently, it is observed that increasing the pressure can make the azeotropic point of ethanol and 1,4-dioxane disappear. Thus, both EG and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) are used as entrainers in indirect extractive distillation (IED) process. The entropy generation of different sections of each column is analyzed. And then, heat integration and heat pump technologies are used to reduce more energy consumption. The comparison results show that the total annual cost (TAC), total energy consumption, CO2 emissions and entropy generation of IED process with DMSO as entrainer (IED-DMSO) is smaller than those processes with EG as entrainer. The IED-DMSO process in combination with heat integration performs best, the TAC is reduced by 41.96%, energy consumption is reduced by 50.28%, CO2 emissions is decreased by 50.28% and entropy generation is decreased by 57.46% comparison with the IED-EG process.

Automated summary

Energy-saving extractive distillation method is proposed for separating ethanol and 1,4-dioxane from industrial effluent. Ethylene glycol (EG) is chosen as entrainer in direct extractive distillation, and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is used in the indirect extractive distillation (IED) process. Heat integration and heat pump technologies are employed to reduce energy consumption. The IED-DMSO process combined with heat integration achieves the best performance, with significant reductions in total annual cost, energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and entropy generation compared to the IED-EG process.