Abstract—Liquid-liquid extraction is a widely used unit operation in separation processes. It is omnipresent in all chemical, biochemical and food processing industries. This technique has long been used for purifying the Wet Process Phosphoric Acid (WPA) with fairly good purification performances. The purification is carried out in three step process: extraction, washing and recovery. Each of these steps is a liquid-liquid extraction operation. Because of the complexity of such operations, the choice of the best operating conditions has been a challenging task for engineers. In the present work, the simulation of the WPA has been conducted. The aim was to develop a computer code that helps predicting the overall performance of the purification process for a given set of operating conditions. The adopted approach is based on determining the necessary theoretical stages (NTS) and the contents of acid and impurities in the two phases for each step in the purification process using a numerical technique. The results of the simulation of the WPA purification process by the Tri Butyle Phosphate (TBP) will be shown.
Index Terms—Wet Phosphoric Acid, Purification, Solventextraction, Simulation, NTS.
The authors are with National Engineering School of Gabes, University of Gabes, Tunisia.
[PDF]
Cite: Rania Hamdi, Naima Khleifia, and Ahmed Hannachi, "Simulation of Multistage Extraction Units for Wet Process Phosphoric Acid Purification," International Journal of Chemical Engineering and Applications vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 181-184, 2011.
