Study of enrichment of cumin essential oil by simulation of a continuous multicomponent distillation and comparison with experiments

In this paper, the enriching of the main component of cumin essential oil is studied by simulation of a continuous multicomponent distillation. The simulation is based on a bubble point method and Wang-Henke algorithm. The MESH equations are solved using three diagonal matrices (Thomas method) in each iteration. The results of the experiment are obtained along with the simulation. These experiments were carried out in a continuous distillation column with one to five sieve trays. The effect of tray numbers on the main component enriching is analyzed. The results of the simulation are compared with those of the experiments. The results show that the main component of cumin essential oil enriched from 25% to 50% by a distillation column with five trays. The results show that the effect of one tray adding to low tray numbers column makes the further influence on the main component enriching respect to adding one tray to high tray numbers column. The results show that the main component separation increased by the increasing of the external reflux ratio from two to three. Increasing the external reflux ratio causes 9.8 percent improvement of the main component extraction in the column with five trays.