Adjustment of the extraction efficiency in the extraction tower
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An extraction tower, whose main purpose is to separate ethanol and organic bases from the oil phase, uses water extraction. Recently, the content of organic bases in the oil phase has remained high. Adjusting the water-to-oil ratio doesn’t have much effect on this issue; do any of you have any good ideas?
I think it’s caused by poor mixing effects
You mean the degree of mixing of oil and water, right? We also conducted relevant experiments on this: manual multiple extractions were carried out to simulate an extraction column, and the result showed a higher alkaline content in the oil phase compared to before ； Tower washing was also carried out, but with little effect.
Could you explain the phenomenon in detail? It can be analyzed
After extraction in the extraction tower at a oil-to-water ratio of 1:1, the oil phase contained approximately 0.2% alkali content. It has remained relatively high at 0.5%-0.7% or even exceeding 1% recently. In our simulations of the extraction tower, the alkali content in the oil phase could be reduced to around 0.2% even after three manual extractions; recently, the levels obtained through manual extraction have also been high, roughly on par with those achieved using the extraction tower. By increasing the water ratio to 1:2, the oil content remains high. It was suspected that the level of alcohol content might be responsible for the poor separation results; however, increasing or decreasing the alcohol content by 5% did not yield better outcomes.
Is it possible that the high alkaline content inherent in the oleic alcohol is the cause, or could it be that there are new water-insoluble alcoholic alkaline substances present in the material?
Normally, oleic alcohol itself has a high alkalinity level, and this can be brought within the specified range by increasing the water ratio; however, I have not encountered such a situation. It was also suspected that a new alkaline substance had dissolved in it.