Performance study of ionic liquid in extraction based on single-drop experiments

Experiments of single-drop sedimentation and mass transfer on a laboratory scale for the extraction of acetone from a water + acetone mixture by means of the ionic liquid 1-hexyl-3-methylimidazolium hexafluorophosphate (HMIMPF₆) were performed at a temperature of 298.2 K and ambient pressure. Study of the system equilibrium conditions in a previous work (Saien et al., 2015) showed that HMIMPF₆, as a green solvent for the extraction of acetone from aqueous solutions, has suitable capability. The single-drop experiments with this system show that the mass transfer is not as slow as expected despite the relatively high viscosity of the system. The Henschke model is applied to the obtained data for the challenging system involving an ionic liquid by determining appropriate values for the corresponding material-specific model parameters. This model describes the experimental data with very good accuracy.