ethanol drying

[pbrod]

Dear all,

We hava about 150m³ of ethanol with 10% water that we need to dry so we can re-use it in our process.

what would be the most economic and easy way of doing this. We were thinking about a membrane system or use zeolite.
Anyone has experience? Are there rental systems for this applications?

Thanks for the help!
best regards

 

[chemebabak]

http://www.ventechequipment.com/Ethanoldryingunit/ethanoldryingunit.htm

http://www.uop.com/products/adsorbents/ethanol/

Think Mol Sieve for industry standard of EtOH drying. Ethanol and water form an azeotrope at 96% ethanol. If you have the heat, you could distill it to that point and then dry it to 99.9% in a dessicant or mol sieve dryer. Otherwise, you will need a pretty big dryer.

Do you need to dry 150 m3 per day, per hour? This is important to specify the size of the dryer and quantity of dessiccant required. What is the pressure of your system? This is important to determine the pressure rating of the dryer. You will have to look at a bunch of different parameters before you can determine the best and most economical option.

 

[pbrod]

Thanks for the reply!

We have time to dry the ethanol. If we could do it in a week or two it would be ok. So we don't need a big throughput system. lets say we are happy with 200liter/hour
So we can use a rather small installation even batch is a possible, maybe something we construct on site.
The mixture is no in two storage tanks and we have an alcohol distillation column in the installation but for ethanol the azeotrope is the problem of course.
In our installation everything is atmosferic or vacuum.