Recovery of the Organic Solvents from the Multicomponent Mixture in the Process of the Fractional Distillation and the Vacuum Distillation

In these times of sustainability, the purification and regeneration of used solvents is attracting a lot of interest for environmental reasons and to reduce production costs. The article presents research on the separation of organic solvents such as acetonitrile, methanol, acetone, and toluene from a multicomponent mixture of liquid organic waste. This is an element of the circular economy and prevents the emission of volatile organic compounds into the environment. In order to separate the mixture and recover the solvents, fractional distillation and vacuum distillation were used together with pre-treatment of the waste using sorption on silica gel and calcium oxide. The analysis of the waste composition and the mixture after the separation was performed by gas chromatography coupled with a mass spectrometer (GC-MS). As a result of the research, the acetonitrile concentration increased to 90.7% after fractional distillation.