Volatile-Constituent Binary Abstraction Tower

A simple name for a Volatile-Constituent Binary Abstraction Tower would be a separation

column. It looks like a huge cylinder with a bunch of pipes sticking out of it, one from the top,
one from the bottom, one from the center, one from the top right and one from the bottom right.
Something almost in the shape of a corndog with perfect form, but made of steel, and huge. The
inside of the column will have trays with openings and weirs; think of a food steamer with
different levels but also with weirs that allow any accumulated liquid to flow down to the next
tray. The openings in the trays are very small and are covered with caps that in turn have small
slots. There will be a lot of trays in the column. This column will help you separate a liquid
mixture. Lets say you want to separate a vodka-water mix into vodka by itself and water by
itself. You will need to boil the drink first. Think of when you boil water, you see a vapour rising,
water vapour. If you boil just vodka, it will take less time for it to start boiling, and for the vodka
vapour to start rising. So if you have a mixture of vodka and water and you bring it to a boil, the
vodka vapour will start rising first. It will still have some traces of water vapour in it since the
two were mixed but it will have more vodka than water. To clean any traces of water from the
vodka vapour you send the mixture to the separation column. The way the column works is that
the mixture enters at the center of the column, it has liquid and vapour in it so it is called a two-
phase mixture, and as it enters the column, some of the vapour will rise through the openings and
the caps. The slots in the caps will allow bubbles to be created on the liquids as the vapour passes
through them and any water in the vapour will turn liquid and stay behind. The vapours will keep
rising and as they do so, they will be cleaned up of water more and more so that the vapour at the
top of the column will have a very clean concentration of vodka with almost no traces of water.
This vapour will be collected in the pipe at the top of the column. In the upper trays, the water
contained in the vapour will turn back into liquid that will overflow the weirs and flow down to
the next tray. Imagine the way a fountain with various levels overflows and sends water down to
the next level; you get a continuous flow of water down the fountain. In this case there is only
one side of the fountain that can overflow because the rest in enclosed. The next tray will
overflow on the opposite side that the previous tray overflowed. As the liquid flows down, it will
have more water because most of the vodka will have been converted into vapour. In other words,
the concentration of water will be greater in the liquid at the bottom of the column. The water is
collected at the bottom of the column and flows down through the pipe. In a way similar to how
the modern food steamers catch the food juices at the bottom so that the nutrients are not lost. At
the end you get a unit full of liquid that came from the juices of the food inside the steamer. In
this case, the juices collect in a juice catchment unit instead of going through a pipe but the
principle is the same. The water at the bottom goes to a re-boiler that in turn is connected to the
column again through a pipe, at the bottom right, so that it can constantly provide vapour back to
the column to allow the process to continue. It sends the liquid water elsewhere. The separation
columns are used in big scales in the industry, especially in the oil and gas industry to separate
oil from different things. They are used to separate immense quantities of mixtures in an efficient
manner. The vodka-water separation was an example of how the columns work. So from the title
of this document, volatile simply means that a substance can become vapour easily, i.e. the water
boiling and turning into vapour. Binary means double, in this case there are two substances
mixed together that need to be separated. Abstraction means removing; we are removing the
water from the vodka. And you can exchange tower for column. Thus, a Volatile-Constituent
Binary Abstraction Tower is simply a separation tower, or column, for two substances.

References:

Bharat, Sneha (2011, October 10). Distillation Column. Retrieved from
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaBMXgVBQKk

Explain Media (2010, January 25). Distillation Tower. Retrieved from
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Fractionating column. (2013, May 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:03,
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http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fractionating_column&oldid=554331493

Food steamer. (2013, April 29). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:06,
September 15, 2013, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Food_steamer&oldid=552785722

Tham, M.T. (2009). Distillation, an Introduction. Retrieved from
http://lorien.ncl.ac.uk/ming/distil/distil0.htm