Obtención de las condiciones óptimas para la separación de una mezcla glicerol-agua

The increased consumption of biodiesel has generated an overproduction of glycerol, which has exceeded market demand. So it is of global concern glycerol find new uses for generating value-added products. For high purity glycerol it is necessary to remove the water by distillation; so it is important to calculate the energy consumption necessary for purification of glycerol. In this work the optimal conditions for obtaining technical grade glycerol were obtained. In the solution of the problem they were considered constant: the number of tray, and the process pressure; and under the following criteria adiabatic operation of the column, total condenser and known amount of reflux. The results showed that the optimal operating conditions that minimize energy consumption for glycerol 90.5 mol% (98 wt%) purity was 15.23 W using at least four column equilibrium stages. In this work, the number of stages and the feed plate was set to find the minor reflux ratio required to obtain the desired product. When the minor reflux ratio is obtained, the feed plate is changed until you find one that allows lower energy needs of the separation process.