CORDIS provides links to public deliverables and publications of HORIZON projects.
Links to deliverables and publications from FP7 projects, as well as links to some specific result types such as dataset and software, are dynamically retrieved from OpenAIRE .
Exploitable results
New pervaporation membranes and systems have been developed for the separation of methanol from hydrocarbons and ethanol from ethers and other organics. The main applications are in methyltetrabutylether (MTBE) and ethyltetrabutylether (ETBE) production plants with other potential uses being in the chemical and petrochemical industries. In comparison with the traditional technology these systems are advantageous with respect to energy saving and lower investment and operating costs.
Furthur applications are found and have been tested in the seperation of methanol and ethanol out of their azeotropic mixtures with other organic components, especially the retrospective esters.
Oxygenated compounds like ethers are produced during refining operations by reacting alcohols (methanol, ethanol) with isoolefins. These compounds are used as octane enhancers in unleaded gasolines. Their production involves complicated and expensive separation processes, based on multi-step distillations.
A new pervaporation technique which can be used in such etherification processes has been developed based on:
a newly developed proprietary pervaporation membrane which enables the selective removal of alcohols like methanol or ethanol from organic mixtures;
new proprietary process schemes for ether production, combining distillation with pervaporation steps.
This new separation technique affords significant savings on both investment and operating costs (mainly because of energy savings) compared to known existing techniques. It appears especially attractive in the case of ETBE production when high ETBE conversion rates and/or fairly high ETBE purities (less than a few % by weight of residual ethanol in the ETBE) are needed.
At this stage, the new membrane has been tested long-term in an industrial pilot plant operated with the actual industrial effluents of etherification processes. A first industrial pervaporation plant has been already built with the new membrane. This plant is being used in the chemical industry, but for a type of application other than synthesis. Therefore, the industrial demonstration of the new etherification process using pervaporation remains to be done in the refining industry.
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