Xylene Separation by Using Colloidal Gas Aphrons

Abstract

Xylene separation has been performed by many techniques. Colloidal Gas Aphron (CGA) showed highly potential for a number of applications in aqueous phase but few in gas phase. To our best knowledge, the xylene separation using CGA were not yet studied. In this study, separation of xylene was performed co-currently in a CGA separation column. In the preliminary experiment, CGA generated from Triton X- 100 was subjected to the study of its stability and size. We found that the high stability of non-ionic CGA was obtained with high surfactant concentration, stirring speed and short stirring time. Regarding the size, however, the size of CGA was increased with high surfactant concentration, low stirring speed and short stirring time. For the xylene separation experiments, we assessed the system parameters of surfactant type, surfactant concentration, CGA retention time, xylene concentration and CGA mass flow rate to investigate the effect of these parameters on the removal efficiency. The non-ionic surfactant gave the highest yield. The removal efficiency increased by increasing surfactant concentration, CGA retention time and mass flow rate. The condition with 17 mM Triton X-100, CGA retention time of 13.3 min, CGA mass flow rate of 83 μmole/s, and 40 ppm of xylene concentration gave the highest efficiency.