Sustainable wastewater treatment via PV-distillation hybrid process for the separation of ethyl acetate/isopropanol/water

The recovery of ethyl acetate and isopropanol from ampicillin sodium wastewater is an important task. The existence of azeotropes system makes it difficult to achieve high purity separation by conventional distillation. In this work, the extractive distillation of ethyl acetate/isopropanol/water by efficient separation method was explored. Based on the COSMO-SAC model, the infinite dilution activity coefficients of the components were calculated, and the potential extractant was further determined. Taking the minimum TAC as the objective function, a sequential iterative method was used to optimize the process. Furthermore, steam recompression and pervaporation technologies were used to reduce the process energy consumption. The economic and environmental performance of several processes was calculated to assess their feasibility. It is conclusion that compare with basic process, the steam recompression process performs well in both economy and environment. While the pervaporation-distillation hybrid process obtained a better environmental performance but showed poor economic performance due to huge equipment costs, which requires a corresponding tradeoff based on the actual industry.