Economic and Environmental Assessment of Alternatives to the Extraction of Acetic Acid from Water

A comparison was made between conventional binary distillation and four feasible alternatives flowsheets to separate acetic acid from water attending to both economic and environmental criteria. All extraction steps use diethyl ether as an extractant. Our goals were, first, to estimate the economic and environmental incentives for each of the alternatives proposed in order to understand the trade-offs associated with each system and second, to show how, in some flowsheets, it is possible to rigorously decompose the system and perform detailed optimization without the necessity of simultaneous optimization of all the equipment implied in the flowsheet. To carry out the economic evaluation, two simple criteria were used: Economic Potential and Total Annual Cost. These parameters were chosen because they can be used at various stages in the chemical plant design without the necessity of a complete picture of the industrial process. The environmental impacts are measured through the Ecoindicator-99 methodolog...