Friday, March 27, 2009

Azeotropic Rectification

Living In Technical Information Overload...


I just noticed that I hadn't written anything here in nearly two days.

It's not that I'm not reading and writing these days, it's just that after reading two or three hundred pages in the past week and writing another several dozen pages of notes and calculations I guess my blogging enthusiasm is a little off.

Take today's information flow, for instance.

In the middle of proof reading mass and energy balance diagrams and developing preliminary site plans with railroad sidings and tractor trailer access I noticed we were producing a sizable waste VOC (volatile organic compound) stream and decided to take a look at what the heck was in the stuff we were writing about.

Turns out that when you heat a bunch of wood chips up the way we're planning we capture several thousand TONS per year of Acetic Acid...the same stuff in tomato sauce, orange juice, and of all things cooking vinegar like you have in your kitchen.

Problem is, our Acetic Acid is mixed with an even larger quantity of water along with some trace tars and resins and the only way to get the stuff all separated involves a process called "Azeotropic Rectification."

Besides not being sure if it's legal to "rectify an Azeotrope" in Tennessee and most other southern states, I'm also still not exactly sure what's involved in such goings on.

I guess that I'll know a lot more about how much it costs to do the "rectification" on my fluid sometime next week and in the mean time it makes my head hurt thinking about it...so I think I'll go watch TV and rest my reading glasses for a while.

Talk to y'all later...
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3 comments:

Ed Drew said...

I can relieve some of your anxiety. I did a google search on
"rectify an Azeotrope in louisiana"
just to see what's going on here and I found out that they are actually rectifying some azeotrope's at a place called: Southern Regional Research Laboratory, in New Orleans, Louisianain New Orleans. I cut and pasted this 'abstract' to save you the trouble.

Abstract: The amount and composition of residual solvent adhering to, or absorbed by extracted oilseed meats is important in research on the design and control of mixed solvent extraction processes. A rapid method requiring unsophisticated apparatus and instrumentation usually available in oilseed processing laboratories for analysis of the extracted marc is described. This method consists of azeotropic distillation of the solvent from the marc followed by centrifugation of the double-phase distillate in calibrated oil centrifuge tubes, reading the volumes of the lower layers, and obtaining the water content from this reading, and a graph, previously constructed by applying the method to known mixtures.
Total volatile matter is determined by evaporation and oven drying. Equations for calculating other volatile components of the marc are given. Data are shown for the recovery and quantitative determination of water, and equations are given for calculating acetone and hexane contents in cottonseed marc extracted with a mixture of these solvents.

Louisiana is not necessarily representative of the South, but clearly rectification is legal here.

See how much you were able to find out while resting your reading glasses?

4:07 PM
Virgil Rogers said...

Since I write this page, I usually don't comment on my commenter's comments...but Mr. Drew is always so supportive and helpful that I couldn't resist this afternoon.

I suspect that Ed knew I was appering to be intentionally obtuse (in pursuit of sophmoric humor) on behalf of the many people out there who think the word "niggardly" is a racist term...just as they might think that "rectification" is something your see in a Porn movie or that happens in a doctor's office.

Yes...Ed, the process is legal...just prohibitively expensive unless you have zillions of pounds of product to process to offset the capitol cost of the equipment needed to complete the process.

I'll know this week if I have any Rectification going on in North Carolina and I'll call Ned Beaty and Burt Reynolds to see if there's a movie...er..um...never mind.

5:31 PM
Ed Drew said...

Yes, one reason I read you regularly is that I enjoy your humor and I hope you read my comment as attempting to do the same thing. rest assured that both Ned and Burt...um, never mind.

when/if you get caught up with your injuneering, you can publish your chili recipe...

12:35 AM

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