The development of a reactive distillation process for the production of n-butyl acetate by transesterification of methyl acetate with n-butanol is presented. Thermodynamic aspects of the quaternary system n-butyl acetate – n-butanol – methyl acetate – methanol are discussed and UNIQUAC interaction parameters derived using the Dortmund Data Bank (DDB) are given. The reaction kinetics of the het...

We report that, for the generation of a secure cryptographic key from correlations established through a noisy quantum channel, the quantum and classical advantage distillation procedures are not equivalent, when coherent eavesdropping attacks are duly taken into account. The quantum procedure can tolerate markedly more noise in the channel than the classical procedure. One of the important pro...

Reactive distillation Reactive Distillation (RD) is a combination of reaction and distillation in a single vessel owing to which it enjoys a number of specific advantages over conventional sequential approach of reaction followed by distillation or other separation techniques. Improved selectivity, increased conversion, better heat control, effective utilization of reaction heat, scope for diff...

In previous work, several significant improvements in the measurement of distillation curves for complex fluids were introduced. The modifications to the classical measurement provide for (1) temperature and volume measurement(s) of low uncertainty, and most important, (2) a composition-explicit data channel in addition to the usual temperature–volume relationship. This latter modification is a...

Coal tar is obtained by cooling the gas that is formed during the destructive distillation of coal to approximately ambient temperature. It is a black, viscous liquid composed primarily of a complex mixture of condensed-ring aromatic hydrocarbons. It may contain phenolic compounds, aromatic nitrogen bases and their alkyl derivatives, and paraffinic and olefinic hydrocarbons. Coal-tar pitch is t...

Experimental VLE data for binary systems of ethanol or water with three 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium ionic liquids (ILs) containing different anions were measured at normal pressure using the Siwoloboff procedure. ILs selected in this study those that appear to be suitable ethanol−water mixture separation by extractive distillation. Measured vapor–liquid equilibria described extended Raoult's la...

In a Petlyuk distillation column, two extra degrees of freedom can be used for optimisation purposes. It has been reported that a typical energy saving of 30% is achievable with a Petlyuk distillation column, compared to conventional distillation arrangements. However, the optimal steadystate operation point can be difficult to maintain in practice. In this work we have studied the performance ...

Classical distillation methods transfer representations from a “teacher” neural network to a “student” network by matching their output activations. Recent methods also match the Jacobians, or the gradient of output activations with the input. However, this involves making some ad hoc decisions, in particular, the choice of the loss function. In this paper, we first establish an equivalence bet...

Topic distillation aims at finding key resources which are high-quality pages for certain topics. With analysis in non-content features of key resources, a pre-selection method is introduced in topic distillation research. A decision tree is constructed to locate key resource pages using query-independent non-content features including in-degree, document length, URL-type and two new features w...

Detailed chemical process simulations are a useful tool in designing and optimizing complex systems and architectures for human life support. Dynamic and steady-state models of these systems help contrast the interactions of various operating parameters and hardware designs, which become extremely useful in trade-study analyses. NASA’s Exploration Life Support technology development project rec...