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Although annular centrifugal contactors (ACCs) have been widely applied, their complex operation and its dependence on operational variables are still not fully quantified. That hinders their acceptance and precludes revealing their potential. Intuitive techniques to informedly operate ACCs while maximizing their gain are thus demanded. This work introduces a procedure to define the operation window of an extraction task on ACCs, using CINC V 02 variant, that demonstrates the feasible ranges of the operational variables and the maximum possible throughput. The overlapping impacts of the variables are also visualized, thus understood and, to enhance practicality, the procedure is converted into user‐interface software. The concept is intended to adapt to any task on ACCs and it is based on merging a hydraulic part focusing on the rotor and a statistical one modeling the annulus mass transfer. Additional insights on ACC's hydraulics and mass transfer dynamics are presented, including the time needed to establish the steady state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the system water + n-propanol + toluene is important for research and industry, its liquid–liquid equilibria LLE are scarcely covered in literature, with no thermodynamic modeling reported using typical equations of state or activity coefficient models. The current work addresses this gap by presenting the equilibria of the system at 20°C and atmospheric pressure. That includes the binodal curve and twelve tie lines covering the entire miscibility gap, whereby the compositions of the conjugate phases are determined using high-precision refractive index measurements. The quality of the data is verified by applying the techniques of conjugate lines and mass balances, whereas it is shown that empirical correlations cannot be used for that purpose. Three different methods to extrapolate the critical point are then employed and, using the more reliable one, that point is located and added to the dataset. Further thermodynamic correlation of the data is conducted using the activity coefficient models, UNIQUAC and NRTL. While the former did not perform well, the latter was able to model the LLE and adapt to temperature changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]