《6Adsorption and separation of light alkane hydrocarbons by porous hexacyanocobaltates (III)》.pdf

Separation and Purification Technology 56 (2007) 47–52 FricDiff: A novel separation concept Marcel Geboers 1, Piet Kerkhof, Peter Lipman, Frank Peters ∗ Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands Received 8 June 2006; received in revised form 15 January 2007; accepted 15 January 2007 Abstract In this paper a novel separation concept is presented. Application to the separation of azeotropic mixtures is discussed and is illustrated with modeling and experimental results. The proposed concept makes use of an additional gaseous component to enhance separation. In counter diffusion this enhancer will exhibit a larger friction with one of the components of the mixture than with the others; lowering the flux of this component while leaving the flux of the other components almost unaltered. Use of this concept in a shell and tube module will lead to a separation. We present modeling and experimental results for the separation of ethanol/H2 O mixtures using CO2 as an enhancer and discuss that separation of the azeotrope is possible with this concept. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: FricDiff; Kinetic separation; Diffusion; Meso/macro pores; Azeotropic separation 1. Introduction of mixtures. Such membranes exhibit low selectivities but are much cheaper and show much higher fluxes than microporous Distillation is still the most important separation method in membranes; making their application possibly interesting for the (petro)chemical industry. About 95% of all energy used in hybrid processes. In our work on the use of such membranes for se