Purification of durene from the mixture of durene and isodurene by stripping crystallization

Stripping crystallization (SC) is introduced in this work to purify durene from the mixture consisting of isodurene and durene. SC is a new technology which combines melt crystallization and vaporization via a series of three-phase transformations at low pressures during the cooling process. The three-phase transformation conditions for a liquid mixture determined by the thermodynamic calculations were adopted to direct the batch SC experiments. A model based on the mass and energy balances was proposed to determine the variation of the amount of remaining liquid, crystallized durene product and produced vapor during SC. The experimental yield and purity of the final durene product obtained from the experiments were compared with those predicted by the model.