Abstract:
Ethanol becoming an alternative fuel source beside fossil fuel. In the process of ethanol purification from water, there is a problem because ethanol-water mixture create azeotrope point. Because of that, we can’t purify ethanol mixture to pure ethanol from conventional distillation. Extractive distillation is the solution for ethanol-water separation process to purify ethanol mixture to pure ethanol. Different extractive distillation flowsheet gives different energy consumption to purify ethanol to minimum 99.5% (fuel grade). Simulation using ASPEN PLUS ™ is needed to know energy consumption in different variation of extractive distillation flowsheet. Three extractive distillation flowsheets were simulated in this research. The first flowsheet is extractive distillation with recovery column, the second is extractive distillation with recovery column and heat utilization, the third is extractive distillation using fully thermally coupled configuration. The purpose of this research is to know energy consumption in that flowsheets. DV configuration is used in that three flowsheets. DV configuration means the manipulated variables which used is distillate flow rate (D) and reboiler duty that will affect vapor flow rate (V) in distillate column.
