Acetone or propanone, it is a colorless, volatile, flammable liquid, and is the simplest and

smallest ketone. It is miscible with water and serves as an important solvent in its own right, typically for
cleaning purposes in laboratories and production of methyl methacrylate and bisphenol A. Acetone is
produced and disposed of in the human body through normal metabolic processes. It is normally present
in blood and urine.

This paper focuses on recovering acetone from waste streams by continuous distillation. Continuous
distillation is an ongoing separation in which a mixture is continuously (without interruption) fed into the
process and separated fractions are removed continuously as output streams. These fractions include at
least one volatile distillate fraction, which has boiled and been separately captured as a vapor condensed
to a liquid, and practically always a bottoms (or residuum) fraction, which is the least volatile residue
that has not been separately captured as a condensed vapor. In this paper the volatile distillate fraction
is the acetone.

In conlusion, by using the McCabe - Thiele method to determine the number of ideal stages, it was
determined that the number of ideal stages for the recovery of acetone must be 16 stages.

While in regards to the plate efficiency of the unit operation it was calculated with two types of
analytical methods. First by the AIChE method which gave a plate efficiency of 71%. Second is by the Van
Winkle correlation that generated a plate effiency of 79%