Destilación del sistema binario etanol-agua mediante aplicación de modelos matemáticos para evaluación de eficiencia de la columna de fraccionamiento

Abstract

The objective of this degree work was to evaluate the efficiency of the distillation column of the Faculty of Chemical and Health Sciences of the Technical University of Machala. This is an experimental study, in which the Normative comparison was used as the main source for the evaluation and rectification of the efficiency of the distillation tower. The variables considered in this work were two components in mixture, which are water and ethanol at different concentrations (60-40, 80-20, 14-86) respectively, which were subsequently taken to the distillation process inside the tower, and to obtain an ideal ethanol recovery percentage. The results were processed through McCabe - Thiele tables and graphs that were made in the free access program GeoGebra, with a didactic and easy to use interface, which allowed the results for analysis to be more accurate. The results obtained in this work were favorable and acceptable according to PDVSA regulations, which indicate that the distillation tower studied is above the minimum acceptance percentage (>60%). In addition, as additional data of this distillation process, it is mentioned that a constant temperature of 78°C is used inside the distillation tower because it is established as the ethanol boiling temperature to achieve the desired recovery. It is also mentioned that the atmospheric pressure is constant and the external temperature is between 30 to 31°C, the internal pressure of the equipment could not be controlled, nor of knowledge, because the distillation equipment does not have a barometer that facilitates the reading of this pressure.