ABSTRACT
282Methylcyclohexane (MCH) and toluene are close boiling point components and pose a huge bottleneck in the distillation process. The better practice is to use the high boiling component phenol as an extractive agent which increases the volatility of MCH with respect to toluene and thereby reduces the number of stages required for desired degree of purity than if phenol would not have been used. In this steady-state simulation we have simulated the process in CHEMCAD software (6.3.1) and tried to see the effect of changing the flow rate of the extractive solvent which gives criterion about the optimum flow rate in the distillation column. In this chapter we have simulated the effect of reflux ratio and the number of stages on the purity of MCH and studied the variation in reboiler heat duty.
