Conceptual design of a high-pressure packed column for the supercritical CO2 fractionation of glycerol acetates

FORTUNATTI MONTOYA, MARIANA; SANCHEZ, FRANCISCO; HEGEL, PABLO; PEREDA, SELVA

Coimbra

Conferencia; Second Iberian Meeting on Supercritical Fluids; 2022

Universidad de Coimbra

The supercritical CO2 (scCO2) fractionation can be a technically and economically feasibletechnology for the separation of liquid products that find application in the chemical,food, and pharmaceutical sector. Particularly, previous works shows the scCO2 can beused for the fractionation of glycerol acetates, a mixture of triacetin, diacetin andmonoacetin obtained by the acetylation of glycerol [1-4]. This chemical reaction is aninteresting route for glycerol valorization, and it has been explored in the literature bydifferent authors [5]. The isolation of the three compounds obtained in the reaction ofacetylation is a key step in the process to get value-added products in actual biorefineries[4,5]. Previous works shows GCA-EOS model predicts accurately the phase equilibriabetween CO2 and glycerol acetates mixtures [1]. Also, modeling of scCO2 extractions ofa commercial glycerol acetates mixture at temperatures between 301 K and 323 K andpressure between 100 bar and 130 bar shows that GCA-EOS is a useful tool to design andoptimize the scale up separation process [2].