Unit operation
Distillation toll manufacturing in India
For clients who need a product purified, a solvent recovered or a crude fractionated, on somebody else’s column.
Live listings
No verified unit lists Distillation capacity yet. Listings appear here the day our desk approves them, and the guide below is how we qualify one when it does.
Post your requirement and our broker desk looks for the capacity by hand, or list your own unit if you run one.
What distillation on job work involves
Distillation is bought as toll manufacturing for two reasons. The first is purification: a crude from your own reactor needs a fractionation the plant you run it in cannot do, so the material travels to a unit with a proper column. The second is recovery: spent solvent streams that are worth more distilled than incinerated, which a recovery unit will process on a job-work basis and return.
The equipment ranges from simple batch stills to packed or trayed fractionation columns with reflux control, and from atmospheric operation to deep vacuum for heat-sensitive material where a lower boiling point protects the product. Continuous columns exist in the larger estates for high-volume streams. The questions that decide fit are purity, thermal stability and what happens to the residue.
What to check before you send an enquiry
The questions our desk puts to a unit before it qualifies an enquiry for Distillation. A listing answers most of them; the trial batch answers the rest.
- Column type and separation power: packed or trayed, number of theoretical stages, and evidence of the purity it has reached on a comparable separation.
- Vacuum capability and the lowest pressure the system holds, with condenser and chilled-water capacity for your solvent’s vapour load.
- Material of construction for corrosive vapours (glass, SS316, lined steel) and a flameproof area classification for flammable solvents.
- Residue and off-spec handling: where high boilers go, whether the plant has authorised hazardous-waste disposal, and how yield is accounted for.
- Analytical support — GC or HPLC on site to release cuts, not a sample sent away for three days.
Where the capacity is
Dahej and Ankleshwar hold the larger distillation and solvent-recovery capacity in Gujarat; Tarapur and Lote Parshuram in Maharashtra and the Hyderabad estates carry columns attached to multi-purpose plants.
Unit operations
Industries served
Common questions
- What is toll distillation?
- Toll distillation is sending a crude or spent stream to a plant that separates it on its own columns and returns the fractions you specify, charging for the service rather than selling you product. It is most often bought for solvent recovery, for purifying an intermediate, and for stripping high or low boilers out of a crude reaction mass.
- What kind of columns do toll distillers offer?
- Simple batch stills for a rough cut, packed or tray columns with reflux for closer separations, and thin-film or wiped-film evaporators for heat-sensitive and high-boiling materials. Vacuum is the usual answer for anything that degrades at its atmospheric boiling point. Ask for the number of theoretical stages, the achievable vacuum, and the maximum jacket temperature.
- Can recovered solvent be returned to me instead of sold?
- Yes, and that is the normal toll arrangement: the solvent remains your material and comes back to you against a processing charge, with the residue handled as waste. Agree in writing who owns the recovered fraction, who owns the residue, and what the expected recovery percentage is, because the gap between those numbers is where disputes start.
- How is purity specified and proven?
- By the analysis you name, not by the word "pure": gas chromatography area percent, water content by Karl Fischer, colour, and residue on evaporation are the common ones. Fix the method and the acceptance limit before the first batch, and ask for a retained sample of every lot.
Other unit operations
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