Mixtures of m- and p-xylene can hardly be separated by an ordinary distillation technique even if extractive distillation is used.
In the present work a new method for separating the mixture is proposed. Namely p-xylene is enriched continuously by adopting a distillation accompanied by the chemical reaction of trans-alkylation on the basis of the fact that only m-xylene reacts with tert-butylbenzene.
A method of computation is also presented for this new distillation process.