Environmental, economic and exergy analysis of separation of ternary azeotrope by variable pressure extractive distillation based on multi-objective optimization

In this work, the ternary azeotrope of tert-butyl alcohol/ethyl acetate/water is separated by extractive distillation(ED) to recover the available constituents and protect the environment. Based on the conductor like shielding model and relative volatility method, ethylene glycol was selected as the extractant in the separation process. In addition, in view of the characteristic that the relative volatility between components changes with pressure, the multi-objective optimization method based on nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II optimizes the pressure and the amount of solvent cooperatively to avoid falling into the optimal local solution. Based on the optimal process parameters, the proposed heat-integrated process can reduce the gas emissions by 29.30%. The heat-integrated ED, further coupled with the pervaporation process, can reduce gas emission by 42.36% and has the highest exergy efficiency of 47.56%. In addition, based on the heat-integrated process, the proposed two heat pump assisted heat-integrated ED processes show good economic and environmental performance. The double heat pump assisted heat-integrated ED can reduce the total annual cost by 28.78% and the gas emissions by 55.83% compared with the basis process, which has a good application prospect. This work provides a feasible approach for the separation of ternary azeotropes.