Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.47, No.21, 8376-8383, 2008
Replacement of Trays by Packing To Increase the Absorption Capacity of Acetone during Cellulose Acetate Spinning
All textile uses of cellulose acetate involve acetone recovery, which, because of safety issues, results in large installations, in order to work with dilute streams. This compromises the efficiency of all of the involved unit operations, in this case, acetone absorption in cold water, acetone distillation, and water chilling, making them more expensive. The present article proposes the improvement of the absorption of acetone in water, traditionally performed with sieve trays, by using structured packing instead. The advantageous implementation was enabled through the utilization of a calculation methodology based on concepts of thermodynamic equilibrium of the binary acetone/water system and empirical relations that allow the evaluation of the hydrodynamics of the proposed modification.