How do I use VLE curves to find suitable T and P for removing chloroform and ethanol from water?
Hi everyone,
I'm an engineer associate at a small biotech company and at the moment, I'm tasked with finding a method in removing chloroform and ethanol (organic solvent) from a solution through a thin-film evaporator for pilot scale production. Mole-wise, the solution itself contains nearly 95% water,1.5% ethanol and 3.5% chloroform. I'm trying to retain the maximum amount of water while stripping out most, if not, all of the organic solvents if possible.
Sadly, I can't simply heat the solution to high temperatures due to a protein suspension in the solution and instead, I was looking into vacuum distillation. I tried using the vle-calculator that I found online (link below), but I'm not sure how to read the vapor pressure map that it provides for ternary systems. I understand that the x-components (liquid) are all equal to 1 and y-components (vapor) are the same as well due to Raoult's law, but I'm not sure how I would find the suitable pressure near vacuum for the process.
As you can see in the link, I'm trying to maintain the temperature at 37C to prevent denaturation. If somebody can point me in the right direction, that would be great.
Posted Apr 26, 2017, 5:51 PM UTC