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Separations
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Separation Technology in Chemical Engineering
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Separation Technology in Chemical Engineering

A special issue of Separations (ISSN 2297-8739). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Separations".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2025) | Viewed by 3395

Editor

Dr. Ming Xia

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, College of Chemical Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing 211816, China
Interests: mass transfer and separation processes; process system engineering; catalytic reaction engineering

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The production of high-COD (chemical oxygen demand) organic waste water and the associated negative impacts remain the main challenges faced by human beings. Although various environmental technologies have been explored, most are not suitable for high-COD organic waste water. The low concentration of the high-COD organic components within water makes the recovery of organic components and the following treatment process energy-intensive. Hence, developing and emloying energy-efficient unit operation systems within chemical engineering for the pretreatment of water is of critical significance. This Special Issue aims to publish works on energy-efficient organic waste water pre-treatment processes by using chemical engineering unit operations, especially distillation, absortion, adsortion and extraction units.

Dr. Ming Xia
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Separations is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • high-COD organic waste water
  • pre-treatment
  • unit operation
  • energy-efficient

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 3632 KB  
Article
Comparison of Dynamic Controllability of Extractive Distillation and Pressure-Swing Distillation for the Separation of Dimethyl Carbonate/Methanol Azeotrope
by Jiancai Sui, Yang Liu, Zhenhua Wang, Tao Li, Kun-Yu Gao, Jin-Ke Chu, Yang-Guang Zhang, Hui Shi, Jihai Tang and Ming Xia
Separations 2026, 13(2), 48; https://doi.org/10.3390/separations13020048 - 27 Jan 2026
Viewed by 1043
Abstract
Dimethyl carbonate (DMC) and methanol (MeOH) form a binary minimum-boiling homogeneous azeotrope, and thus conventional distillation cannot achieve complete separation. The extractive distillation (ED) with o-xylene as a heavy entrainer in our recent work possesses significant energy saving and achieves a high purity [...] Read more.
Dimethyl carbonate (DMC) and methanol (MeOH) form a binary minimum-boiling homogeneous azeotrope, and thus conventional distillation cannot achieve complete separation. The extractive distillation (ED) with o-xylene as a heavy entrainer in our recent work possesses significant energy saving and achieves a high purity of 99.9% DMC compared with the pressure-swing distillation (PSD). For a fair comparison, both ED and PSD were evaluated against the same minimum product specifications (DMC ≥ 99.5 wt% and MeOH ≥ 98.0 wt%), noting that the recovered MeOH stream was recycled to the reactive distillation column rather than treated as a final product. However, the dynamic performance of this ED is still unclear, and all the benefits of the ED are reasonable only under good dynamic controllability. In this work, the dynamic controllability of the ED process was compared with that of the PSD one. Both processes were evaluated under a unified temperature-control philosophy, including conventional fixed R. Closed-loop dynamic simulations were performed under ±10% step disturbances in feed flowrate and composition. It was revealed that under the tested disturbances, DMC purity was maintained close to the high-purity target (≈99.9 wt%) in the ED process, whereas larger deviations and a lower attainable DMC purity were obtained in PSD. The results provide a control-oriented basis for the selection and further development of special distillation schemes for MeOH/DMC azeotropic separation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Separation Technology in Chemical Engineering)
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18 pages, 3471 KB  
Article
Conceptual Design and Optimization of Reactive Distillation-Based Processes for the Separation of Methanol/Methyl Acetate/Ethyl Acetate with an Ethyl Acetate-Rich Feed Composition
by Cong Jing, Liangxiao Wei, Wei Xiang and Keyan Liu
Separations 2026, 13(1), 7; https://doi.org/10.3390/separations13010007 - 24 Dec 2025
Viewed by 1557
Abstract
Industrial effluents often contain azeotropic mixtures that are difficult to separate by conventional distillation. An illustrative case is the methanol/methyl acetate/ethyl acetate (MA/ME/EA) mixture. To address these challenges, this work studies the conceptual design and optimization of the reactive distillation-based hybrid processes for [...] Read more.
Industrial effluents often contain azeotropic mixtures that are difficult to separate by conventional distillation. An illustrative case is the methanol/methyl acetate/ethyl acetate (MA/ME/EA) mixture. To address these challenges, this work studies the conceptual design and optimization of the reactive distillation-based hybrid processes for separating the MA/ME/EA mixture with an EA-rich feed composition (0.25/0.20/0.55 mol fraction). An improved triple-column extractive–reactive distillation with a side-draw product (TCERD-SP) and its heat-integrated variant (TCERD-SP-HI) have been developed. In the TCERD-SP process, EA is strategically withdrawn as a side product, reconfiguring the extractive column into integrated pre-separation and entrainer-recovery sections, thereby reducing entrainer and energy demands. A four-step process design methodology is applied, including thermodynamics analysis, conceptual design, rigorous optimization via Aspen Plus integrated with the genetic algorithm to minimize total annual cost (TAC), and comparative evaluation of economic and environmental performance. The results show that the basic double-column pre-separation-reactive distillation (DCPSRD) process, optimal for a previous feed composition, exhibits unsatisfactory TAC performance for this EA-rich feed composition. Among the configurations studied, the TCERD-SP process exhibits superior performance, saving TAC by 8.4% and 14.4% compared to the TCERD and DCPSRD processes, respectively. In addition, based on the advantage of convenient heat integration between the side reboiler and the reactive distillation column condenser, the heat-integrated TCERD-SP-HI process achieves a further 10.7% TAC reduction. Thus, for this EA-rich feed examined in this work, the TCERD-SP and TCERD-SP-HI processes are demonstrated as effective solutions for recovering these valuable chemicals. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Separation Technology in Chemical Engineering)
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