Water Removal from an Ethanol-Water Mixture at Azeotropic Condition by Adsorption Technique

Abstract

The separation of ethanol-water mixture is employed in the present work to produce pure ethanol, the present investigation on the separation of water from the ethanol to achieve pure ethanol by adsorption process. The different parameters like quantity of adsorbent, flow rate of feed mixture, and different adsorbents which are zeolite 3A, zeolite 4A, and silica gel are selected to study purification of ethanol by adsorption. The effect of process parameter for purification is also recorded and studied to evaluate the performance of adsorption equipment and adsorbent. The experiments are conducted at 30°C. The feed mixture is 95.6% (v/v) concentration of ethanol and 4.4% (v/v) of water. The designed adsorption column is suitable for purification of ethanol. The highest ethanol concentration 99.9443% obtained at 20 ml/min flow rate of feed mixture using 50 g of zeolite.