مطالعه غني سازي اسانس نعناع به وسيله شبيه سازي تقطير چند جزيي پيوسته و مقايسه آن با نتايج آزمايشگاهي

Study enrichment of spearmint essential oil by simulation of a continuous multicomponent distillation and comparison to experiments

In this paper, the enriching of the main component of spearmint oil is studied by simulation of a continuous multicomponent distillation. The simulation is based on a bubble point method and Wang-Henke algorithm. The MESH equations are solved using three diagonal matrixes (Thomas method) in each iteration. The results of the experiment are obtained along with the simulation. These experiments were carried out in a continuous distillation column with one to five sieve trays. The effect of tray numbers on the main component enriching is analyzed. The results of the simulation are compared to those of the experiments. The results show that the main component of spearmint essential oil enriched from 31% to 60% by a distillation column with five trays. The results showed the effect of adding one tray with low tray numbers column on the main component enriching was more than adding one tray with several tray numbers column. The results show that the main component separation increased by the increasing of the external reflux ratio from two to three. Increasing the external reflux ratio causes four percent improvement of the main component extraction in the column with five trays.