Simulation Studies on Recovery of Acetonitrile from Aqueous Acetonitrile Waste from Pharmaceutical Processes

This paper presents simulation studies on the recovery of Acetonitrile from aqueous Acetonitrile waste from pharmaceutical processes. The focus is on atmospheric distillation in two sequential columns to understand the separation feasibility of the system; the first column produces a distillate of azeotropic composition, which is mixed with a fresh stream and fed to a second column, which produces a 99.9% pure Acetonitrile in the residue. The effect of reflux ratio, reboiler duty and the fresh stream flowrate on the purity of the product is analyzed. The study was performed using steady state simulator Aspen Plus, version 11.1. The simulation results indicate that it is possible to obtain a product of 99.9% w/w Acetonitrile from a 1:1 feed with a recovery of ~ 60%.