Quantitative structure-relative volatility relationship model for extractive distillation of ethylbenzene/p-xylene mixtures: Application to binary and ternary mixtures as extractive agents

Ethylbenzene (EB) and p-xylene (PX) are important chemicals for the production of industrial materials; accordingly, their efficient separation is desired, even though the difference in their boiling points is very small. This paper describes the efforts toward the identification of high-performance extractive agents for EB and PX separation by distillation. Most high-performance extractive agents contain halogen atoms, which present health hazards and are corrosive to distillation plates. To avoid this disadvantage of extractive agents, we developed a quantitative structure-relative volatility relationship (QSRVR) model for designing safe extractive agents. We have previously developed and reported QSRVR models for single extractive agents. In this study, we introduce extended QSRVR models for binary and ternary extractive agents. The QSRVR models accurately predict the relative volatilities of binary and ternary extractive agents. The service to predict the relative volatility for binary and ternary extractive agents is freely available from the Internet at http://qsrvr.opengsi.org/.