Consider a ternary mixture composed of chloroform, acetone, and methanol at 1 atm. This Demonstration plots the (blue) distillation line that corresponds to the composition profiles in a staged column at infinite reflux. You can drag the locator to change the position of this curve. This curve is found by solving the following equation:
where
is the liquid mole fraction of component
at stage
and
is the vapor mole fraction of component
at stage
.
The azeotropes (labeled in the figure by
for
from
1 to 4) and pure components appear as the fixed points of
. It turns out that it is equivalent to finding the fixed points of equation (1) and the singular points of
,
which gives the residue curves or the composition profile in a packed column at infinite reflux.
Browse all topics
