Preliminary Process Synthesis II For the first step in the separation process, gas stripping was selected instead

of liquidliquid extraction for several reasons. Liquid-liquid extraction often uses oley l alcohol to selectively remove ABE products (Shi, Zhang, Chen, and Mao, 2005); however, this compound was not in ASPEN PLUS, which was used in this project for all liquid-liquid equi libria calculations. Most other compounds considered for liquid-liquid extraction were either too hydrophobic to selectively extract acetone and ethanol from water or too hydroph ilic to provide an efficient phase split with water. In addition, there is interest in using bu tanol as a food-grade extractant (Ezeji, Qureshi, and Blaschek, 2003), so adding an organic, and likel y toxic, extractant to the butanol synthesis process would be undesirable. In contrast, gas strippi ng selectively removes the alcohols and solvents from water without introducing any new chemica ls to the mixture, without requiring the addition of another distillation column to separa te the extractant, 24 as liquid-liquid extraction would. Thus, stripping was selected as the first un it operation in the separation section. Initial work on the rest of the separation section focused on design heuristics presented in Seider, Seader, Lewin, and Widagdo (2009), as well as a description of the ABE p rocess provided by Wu et al. (2007). The authors based their design on a sensitivity a nalysis that suggested the cheapest method of ABE separation was an initial stripping or extr action step to remove the bulk of the water, then a distillation column which separates butanol out in the bottoms, a distillation column that separates acetone out in the overhead stream , and then a final distillation column that separates ethanol and water to their azeotropic composi tion. We ended up using a very similar separation train, but industrial consultants suggested u se of a decanter and molecular sieves in place of a distillation column to remove water. This ul timately decreased the energy use of the process, since one of the condensers and reboile rs were eliminated, making it a more sustainable process.