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Tutorial on using the distillation and loss operations


Example - model of ethanol distillation out from fermented mixture using this flowchart editor / process simulator


spirit still


Before you continue...

...you should have a basic understanding of the following:



Topic and recipe of example project


Produce ethanol from sugar by fermentation

Dissolve 30 kg of sugar in 100 litres of aqueous 2.9 g/l sodium citrate buffer solution. Add some fermentation culture to it and let the formed CO2 leave into the air.

Then distill off the formed ethanol from the mixture.

Tip: try to follow this tutorial with the flowchart editor using example project: Ethanol production by fermentation!



Distillation: separate volatile components from less volatile ones



Define distillate composition according to the following:
  • Use %C unit as often as possible. This makes your project more robust to changes.
  • Use 100 %C for volatile compounds which evaporate totally, and the whole amount of them is transferred into the distillate
  • For non-volatile components which remain totally in the residue not even a row is necessary. These can be omitted.
  • Volatile components which distills out to a definite extent should be defined, and the amount must be determined by some experimental work. Swith the unit in the checking fields to %FM, composition of the distillate could be checked easily.


example distillate definition


Define composition of the residue by the same method but inversely from the point of view of volatility. The higher amount remains in the residue, the higher amount to set in the composition table.



Loss of distillation: uncondensed material as loss



Some loss of vapor occurs at every distillation process due to imperfect condensation or/and imperfect sealing. If data is available about this kind of loss, it can be used in this program by the "loss" operation. Before this an output material must be definied for summarizing losses (e.g. "lost compounds into the air" or "exhaust gases into the air").

The composition of lost vapor should be roughly the same as the condensed distillate. In the example below the amount of uncondensed vapor takes about 0.5% of the initial mixture.

loss caused by imperfect condensation




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