There are different purification technologies aimed at separating azeotropic mixtures, among which extractive and pressure-swing distillation stand out. While the former is characterized by the use of a solvent, the latter is employed when the composition of mixtures is significantly affected by the operating pressure. In this article, said separation technologies are applied to a tetrahydrofuran-water mixture and further compared to one another in terms of their exergetic performance and CO₂ emission rate. Two configurations were used as case studies and further improved in order to propose new fully-integrated designs. The exergy analysis was performed by determining both the total exergy destruction rate and exergetic efficiency, whereas the CO₂ emissions were evaluated by estimating the indirect releases due to electricity and thermal energy consumption. Although the results showed that the proposed schemes have a higher exergetic performance and lower CO₂ emission rate than their original designs, the extractive processes proved to be better than both pressure-swing technologies. More specifically, the proposed fully heat-integrated extractive configuration was deemed to be the best alternative since it has approximately 7.4 % lower exergy destruction rate and 7.2 % lower carbon emission rate than the fully heat-integrated pressure-swing scheme.

有多种分离共沸混合物的纯化技术，其中萃取法和变压蒸馏法尤为突出。前者的特点是使用溶剂，而当混合物的组成受操作压力的影响很大时，可以使用后者。在本文中，将所述分离技术应用于四氢呋喃-水混合物，并在其高能性能和CO ₂排放速率方面进行了进一步比较。使用了两种配置作为案例研究，并进行了进一步改进，以提出新的完全集成的设计。通过确定总的火用破坏率和火用效率来进行火用分析，而CO ₂通过估算由电力和热能消耗引起的间接排放来评估排放。尽管结果表明，所提出的方案比其原始设计具有更高的火力性能和更低的CO ₂排放率，但事实证明，萃取过程优于两种变压技术。更具体地，所提出的完全热集成的抽气构造被认为是最佳的替代方案，因为与完全热集成的压力波动方案相比，它的火用破坏率降低了约7.4％，碳排放率降低了7.2％。