Quantitative structure relative volatility relationship model for extractive distillation of ethylbenzene/ p -xylene mixtures

Extractive distillation is a highly effective process for the separation of compound pairs having low relative volatility values, such as ethylbenzene (EB) and p-xylene (PX) mixtures. Many solvents or solvent mixtures have been screened experimentally to identify a suitable extraction agent for EB/PX mixtures. Because the number of possible solvent and solvent mixture candidates is high, it is necessary to introduce a computer-aided extraction performance prediction technique. In this study, a knowledge-based quantitative structure relative volatility relationship (QSRVR) model was developed using multiple linear regression (MLR) and artificial neural network (ANN) models, with each model having five descriptors. The root-mean-square errors (RMSE) of the training and test sets for the MLR model were calculated as 0.01486 and 0.00905, while their squared correlation coefficients (R²) were 0.867 and 0.941, respectively. The R² and RMSE values of the total data set for the MLR model were 0.878 and 0.01408, and for the ANN model the values were 0.949 and 0.00929, respectively. The predictive ability of both models is sufficient for identifying suitable extractive distillation solvents for the separation of EB/PX mixtures.