Recovery of acetoin from the ethanol-acetoin-acetic acid ternary mixture based on adsorption methodology using a hyper-cross-linked resin

The separation performances, in terms of adsorption selectivity, desorption, and regeneration of an innovative hyper-cross-linked resin (HD-02) for recovery of acetoin from the ethanol-acetoin-acetic acid ternary mixture were explored in this work. The competitive adsorption behaviors of the ternary mixture were determined experimentally. The results showed the HD-02 resin had a good adsorption selectivity toward acetoin over acetic acid and ethanol. Subsequently, the desorption behaviors in terms of desorption isotherms and kinetics were systematically investigated. Using ethanol as a desorbent, the recovery could be achieved as high as 98% in the batch desorption experiments. The Fick model was adopted to simulate the desorption process. The simulation results revealed that the intraparticle diffusion was the rate-limiting step and the obtained effective diffusivities (1.530 × 10^-9 m ²/min) were independent of the acetoin concentrations. In the end of this work, three cycles of adsorption-desorption-regeneration operations confirmed good reproducibility of the resin for the attainment of acetoin.