Purification of chlorophenol isomers by stripping crystallization combining melt crystallization and vaporization

Stripping crystallization (SC) was introduced in this work to purify p-chlorophenol from the p-chlorophenol-rich liquid mixture and to purify m-chlorophenol from the m-chlorophenol-rich liquid mixture, respectively. Essentially, SC combines melt crystallization and vaporization to produce the solid product and the vapor from a liquid mixture via a series of three-phase transformations at reduced pressures during the cooling process. At the end of the SC, only the solid product remained while the liquid mixture was almost eliminated and the produced vapor was removed. A set of differential equations based on the mass and energy balances were proposed to determine the incremental variations of the amounts of remaining liquid, produced solid and produced vapor during the batch SC process. The experimental yield and product purity of the final product obtained from the batch SC experiments were compared with those predicted by the model.