LIQUID MEMBRANE TECHNIQUE FOR SEPARATION OF BENZENE AND HEXANE MIXTURE

The effect of operating parameters on the batch scale separation of hydrocarbon mixture (benzene and hexane) with emulsion liquid membrane technique is reported. An emulsion liquid membrane is a film composed of surfactants and their solvent. The sparkleen detergent is used as surfactant and heavy mineral oil as solvent to receive the permeates. The parameters that influenced the permeation are, composition of feed, contact time with solvent, ratio of volume of surfactant solution to volume of hydrocarbon feed, surfactant concentration. The best conditions for the separation in this study were found to be: composition of feed (mole fraction of benzene=0.5245), contact time of 10min. , ratio of volumes of surfactant solution to feed of 0.4 and surfactant concentration of 1wt%. These conditions gave a separation factor of (8.0). the process efficiency is evaluated by the separation factor is a parameter to evaluate the process efficiency with respect to distillation process.