Designing Liquid-Liquid Extraction Columns by Pilot Plant Testing.
Process Development Symposium
2014
2014 Process Development Symposium
General Program
Unit Operations - Real World Applications
Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - 11:45am to 12:10pm
Almost every liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) project involves a pilot test to provide the basis for commercial plant design. Unlike distillation, which can often be design by simulations and known capacity/efficiency parameters for column internals, LLE usually has many unknown factors such as equilibrium, efficiency, and capacity data. Small trace impurities can have a significant impact on all of the above. The development procedure for LLE generally requires three basic steps; (1) solvent selection and generation of liquid-liquid equilibrium data, (2) column selection and pilot plant testing to generate the optimal performance data, and (3) accurate scale-up technique to design the production scale equipment. As the diameter of an LLE column increases the tendency for back mixing increases resulting in lower efficiency. Thus, a key for scale-up from the pilot plant test work to the production column is to understand how the efficiency changes with diameter and to correlate this into the design of the production column. Over years of experience with many different LLE systems, proven scale up correlations have been developed for a number of different types of extraction columns and used for the design of production columns which have met or exceeded expectations. This presentation will conclude by presenting case studies for two extraction processes including data generated in the pilot plant and then calculations for sizing the production columns.
Checkout
This paper has an Extended Abstract file available; you must purchase the conference proceedings to access it.
Do you already own this?
Log In for instructions on accessing this content.
Pricing
Individuals
AIChE Pro Members | $895.00 |
AIChE Graduate Student Members | $895.00 |
AIChE Undergraduate Student Members | $895.00 |
AIChE Explorer Members | $1095.00 |
Non-Members | $1095.00 |