In this work, a method was developed employing the commercial process simulator Aspen Hysys using a countercurrent multistage column to the fractioning/deacidification of vegetable oils applying processes such as liquid-liquid extraction, using ethanol as solvent, and supercritical fractioning, with CO2 as solvent. Palm and olive oil were used in the case study. Experimental equilibrium data of multicomponent systems published in the literature were correlated with both NRTL model and RK-Aspen models, the binary interaction parameters obtained from these correlations were used in the simulations. The same procedure was applied to the fractioning/deacidification process of the organic liquid products (OLP) from the thermal-catalytic cracking of palm oil, using supercritical CO2 as solvent. The correlation of liquid-liquid equilibrium data of the systems showed that the NRTL model was able to suitably fit the experimental data for all the studied systems with RMSD between 0.15 to 1.72%. For all the S/F ratios analyzed, simulation results demonstrated, on the 10 stage column, that only when a mixture water+ethanol (12.41%) was used as solvent, the maximum acceptable level of neutral oil loss for industrial physical refining (5%wt) was attained. Correlation of experimental equilibrium data at high pressures indicated that the RK-Aspen model was able to properly fit the equilibrium data for all studied systems, with RMSD from 3.0E-05% to 0.58% for the liquid phase and between 2.0E-06% to 0,02% for vapor phase, for each composition of free fatty acid in the feed. The absolute mean deviations between the supercritical fractioning process simulated with 10 stages using the olive oil model mixture and the experimental results of supercritical fractioning of olive oil in a pilot scale column at 313K, S/F=20, with varying pressure and different fatty acid composition in the feed, were 2.25% for the yield of raffinate stream and 0.15% for the fatty acid concentration in the raffinate stream.
The simulations of supercritical fractioning of OLP, with 10-staged columns, showed that the CO2 was able to deacidificate the produced fractions. For both proposed process diagrams with the column 1 using S/F=17 or 19, column 2 for all the studied S/F ratios, presented top streams (extract) containing compositions characteristic of kerosene from petroleum, with lower olefin and oxygenated content compared to the experimental fraction distillated within the same temperature range of petroleum kerosene published in the literature.
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