Separation of Butanol Using Pervaporation: A Review of Mass Transfer Models

Abstract

Pervaporation is a suitable technique for butanol recovery from aqueous solutions especially ABE fermentation broths. The performance of the membrane, in terms of permeation flux and modelling of the mass transfer through membranes provides a deeper understanding, which may assist to orient the research and the development of pervaporation processes. Modelling of the mass transport through the membrane is based on sorption and diffusion of the components into and across the membrane. In this study, an overview of the different models used for the pervaporation separation of butanol is presented. Up to now, the solutiondiffusion based models were the main methods used and the Maxwell-Stefan theory was very limited. In addition, to our knowledge, the pore-flow model was not applied for the modelling of butanol pervaporation separation. Moreover, the Maxwell-Stefan theory seems to be the most accurate mass transfer model to be used for the pervaporation separation method in comparison to the other models.