Evaluation of a Simplified Model of Adsorption Used to Separate Ethanol-water

With the increasing demand for high quality anhydrous ethanol the production process by adsorption cycle is gaining more space among dehydration conventional processes, since the adsorption process does not leave traces of solvent in the final product and when compared with other dehydration processes (extractive and azeotropic distillations) has lower power consumption. However, the design of an adsorptive separation process is complicated and expensive when done in experimental and pilot scale, so a simulation tool is used to assist the design. To make the simulation of the adsorption process, it was chosen GAMS/CONOPT3 software since it presents great robustness in solving mathematical models. However, before the simulation of the pressure swing cycle, it is necessary to assess whether the chosen software is effective to solve the adsorption step. The objective of this work is the simplified simulation of an adsorption column for separation of ethanol-water mixture to evaluate the reliability of GAMS software to simulate the adsorption process. The present results were compared with EMSO software results using the same adsorption model removed from the work of SIMO et. al. (2008), which made the separation of ethanol-water mixture using experimental data.