Separation of water - Acetic acid mixtures by cyclic distillation

Acetic acid is a carboxylic acid, industrially produced for a large range of applications. All the processes include a water – acetic acid separation step which, due to the presence of a tangent pinch on the pure water end, is performed in practice through heterogeneous azeotropic distillation. The current paper compares the separation of the water – acetic acid mixture through conventional distillation, cyclic distillation, and azeotropic distillation with i-butyl acetate as entrainer. Cyclic distillation is a better technique compared to the conventional distillation. However, for applications in which the contamination of acetic acid with i-butyl acetate is allowed, the azeotropic distillation is economically a better candidate.