Design and optimisation of novel hybrid side-stream reactive-extractive distillation for recovery of isopropyl alcohol and ethyl acetate from wastewater

For the first time, we developed a novel side-stream double-column reactive-extractive distillation (SS-DCRED) for the recovery of isopropanol (IPA) and ethyl acetate (EA) from wastewater. Starting with the conceptual design and optimisation of a double-column reactive-extractive distillation (DCRED) using particle swarm optimisation (PSO), we designed and optimised next the SS-DCRED, which is the main contribution of this work. In addition, a reactive-extractive dividing wall column (REDWC) was also developed as we intend to benchmark the SS-DCRED with the REDWC, which is available in literature. The performance of the SS-DCRED was also compared against the DCRED and the best heat-integrated conventional extractive distillation (HI-CED) using ionic liquid (ILs) and ethylene glycol (EG) from previous work based on total energy consumption, TAC, environmental performance, and thermodynamic efficiency. Overall, the total energy consumption, TAC, and environmental performance of the SS-DCRED are 51%, 40%, and 51% lower with respect to the HI-CED using ILs and are 63%, 56%, and 63% lower than the HI-CED using EG from previous work. Likewise, it is also better than the REDWC by about 8%, 4%, and 9% in terms of total energy consumption, TAC, and environmental emissions with respect to the REDWC. These significant enhancement highlights the superiority of our proposed SS-DCRED.