Separation of meta- and para-xylene mixture by distillation accompanied by chemical reactions

Abstract

Mixtures of m- and p-xylene can hardly be separated by an ordinary distillation technique even if extractive distillation is used. In the present work a new method for separating the mixture is proposed. Namely p-xylene is enriched continuously by adopting a distillation accompanied by the chemical reaction of trans-alkylation on the basis of the fact that only m-xylene reacts with tert-butylben-zene. A method of computation is also presented for this new distillation process. © 1971, The Society of Chemical Engineers, Japan. All rights reserved.