摘要

Azeotropic distillation as an early and important special distillation process is commonly used in laboratory and industry. It can be used for separating the mixture with close boiling point or forming azeotrope. This paper tries to provide a review on azeotropic distillation for general readers, focusing on entrainer selection and mathematical models. Since the 1950s, along with extractive distillation, azeotropic distillation has gained a wide attention. Like extractive distillation, the entrainer, i.e., the third component added to the system, is also the core of azeotropic distillation. In the process design and synthesis, the graphical method (in most cases refer to as triangular diagram) is often employed. But it is better to take on the results from graphical method as the initial values of rigorous equilibrium (EQ) stage/non-equilibrium (NEQ) stage models. One outstanding characteristic of the EQ/NEQ stage models different from extractive distillation and catalytic distillation is to describe phase split for heterogeneous azeotropic distillation. In general, the operation process is very sensitive to some parameters in the case of more than one azeotrope formed, and thus the phenomenon of multiple steady states (MSS) tends to appear.