Browsing by Author "Cardona, Carlos"

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    Aplicación de la termodinámica en la síntesis óptima de procesos químicos y biotecnológicos
    (Universidad de Cuenca, 2015-12) Forero, Héctor; García, Carlos; Cardona, Carlos
    Biomass appears as a promising alternative to produce environmentally friendly compounds with competitive advantages over non-renewable compounds. Bio-furfural is one of these compounds, and currently has become one of the most important and commonly used worldwide compounds. Alternatively, bio-furfural has been used as a building block to develop chemical platforms in order to produce some other compounds of industrial interest. This work implements the thermodynamic analysis of furfural production in a biorefinery from lignocellulosic biomass. Techno-economic, energy and exergy are evaluated in order to determine the economic and energy viability of this process. As a result, the production of furfural from sugarcane bagasse under the biorefinery concept has high economic profitability, besides other products can be used to increase the economic performance of the biorefinery. Additionally, plant or process sections with higher energy requirements and irreversibilities are determined. Alkaline and enzymatic hydrolysis were the processes with the highest irreversibilities, however, the plants for furfural and ethanol production has the highest energy needs related to the reaction and separation stage, respectively.
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    Comparación de modelos termodinámicos en el análisis topológico de mezclas
    (Universidad de Cuenca, 2016-05) Forero, Héctor; Caballero, Ashley; García, Blanca; Castro, Agustín; Gómez, Alvaro; Pisarenko, Yuri; Cardona, Carlos
    The objective of this paper is to introduce and propose a thermodynamic model appropriate for predicting the properties of the propanoate methyl – propionic acid – methanol – water mixture, resulting from the esterification of propionic acid. For this purpose, a topological analysis is carried out from phase equilibrium calculation and azeotropy evaluation, considering three thermodynamic models and mixing rules (PCSAFT, PRWS and PSRK). Based on the performed analysis, it was found that the predictive model Soave Redlich Kwong, is the most appropriate for the studied mixture since it predicts the azeotropes that are reported in practice. In addition, the conceptual analysis of the trajectories of process shown in the residue curves was performed and a process trajectory for obtaining the products in a distillation tower according to the required design considerations was established.