Determination of Phase Equilibrium Properties of Propylene Glycol Methyl Ether Acetate and Its Binary Mixtures

Abstract

Nirali Y. Vyas Department of Chemical Engineering, Institute of Technology, Nirma Uni- versity, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India Email- 13mchc11@nirmauni.ac.in Conventional solvents used in industries create so many problems like environmental, health and safety. Green solvents provide an attractive alternate to the conventional solvents. Propylene glycol methyl ether acetate is one of the green solvents. Propylene glycol methyl ether acetate (PGMEA) is widely used as a solvent in the preparation of photoresist agents for manufacturing color liquid crystal displays (LCD). It can be synthesized from acetic acid and propylene glycol methyl ether (PGME) via esteri cation, and water is a byproduct of this reaction. The phase-equilibrium properties, including vapor liquid equilibrium (VLE) and vapor-liquid- liquid equilibrium (VLLE), for the mixtures containing acetic acid, PGME, PGMEA, and water are fundamentally important in the development of chemical processes for producing PGMEA via either a conventional reaction-then-separation multistep method or an e cient reactive- distillation one-step method. The phase equilibrium data are also useful in the process design for recovery of PGMEA from the spent aqueous solutions, which are often encountered in electronic plants. Phase equilibrium thermodynamics is one of the most important fundamental sciences for process development in the chemical industry. The outstanding results achieved by thermody- namics in the last decades have led to a profound change in working methods for the development of thermal separation processes. Thermodynamic modeling is used for simulating the VLE data for separation process. Now a day computer programming is a faster way to use di erent thermodynamic model and the most tedious job can be minimizing the operation time and errors. The biggest problem in using these models is being aware of the range where they were derived originally.