mattman1978 - 8-8-2005 at 06:51
I saw a post similar to this and I thought I would respond. Partly to help others, partly to get some advice. In industry, we avoid the use of
Benzene when doing ANYTHING. Health effects are BAD. Instead, we use heptane as an azetroping agent in the azetropic distillation of IPA and water.
Is a Very simple distillation. Simply distill to a splitter, remove the bottom layer (heavy phase) and reflux the top layer to a packed column. You
WILL eventually get a mixture of IPA and heptane in the bottom. And it will go to 0.01 % moisture or better! Problem is, in the plant, this is
EXTREMELY wasteful with respect to the afor mentioned bottom layer. The stinking layer has a LOT of IPA and some Heptane. (IPA actually works pretty
well to dissolve heptane into water). Oh and we are useing the cheap heptane, mixture of isomers. Cyclohexane also works well. Anyhow, does anyone
else have any good ideas for azetroping agents? They must be generally non reactive and must boil up with the IPA/water mixture.