Systematic Process Intensification involving Zeotropic Distillation

Journal Article · Wed Jul 31 00:00:00 EDT 2019 · Computer Aided Chemical Engineering

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-818597-1.50067-9· OSTI ID:1642440

Li, Jianping ^[1]; Demirel, Salih Emre ^[1]; Hasan, M. M. Faruque ^[1]

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1. Texas A & M Univ., College Station, TX (United States)

Distillation is commonly used for separating homogeneous fluid mixtures. While it is based on a simple thermally driven vapor-liquid equilibrium phenomenon at the two-phase region, different variants of distillation systems exist. These include simple distillation, dividing wall columns, pressure swing distillation, thermally coupled distillation and reactive distillation. Complex separation may also involve multiple distillation in a sequence to achieve the desired products. These sequences can be constructed as direct sequence, indirect sequence or thermally coupled columns. Even when a sequence is fixed, each column in the sequence can have a plethora of design alternatives to consider. All these make the design and intensification of distillation systems a challenging task. The large number of plausible design alternatives increases the combinatorial complexity for screening. Although significant efforts have been made in the past, we still lack a method for systematic identification of novel pathways for process intensification of distillation system. This is due to the lack of a generalized representation of all plausible alternatives in a single modeling and optimization framework. In this work, we first present a general representation of thermally driven vapor-equilibrium phenomenon using abstract building blocks. Specifically, each tray in a distillation column is represented by a liquid block and a vapor block with a shared semi-restricted boundary representing the interface. The arrangement of these building blocks in a two-dimensional grid gives rise to all plausible variants of distillation systems. These systems range from simple distillation, dividing wall columns to task-integrated columns. This enables us to systematically identify both classic and out-of-the-box intensified designs at the column and flowsheet levels. The overall distillation-based separation process synthesis problem is formulated as a single mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model. In conclusion, the proposed approach is applied to multi-component zeotropic systems to show the capability of identifying promising intensified alternatives.

• Research Organization: RAPID Manufacturing Institute, New York, NY (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Energy Efficiency Office. Advanced Manufacturing Office; National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Grant/Contract Number: EE0007888
• OSTI ID: 1642440
• Journal Information: Computer Aided Chemical Engineering, Vol. 47; Conference: 9.International Conference on Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Design (FOCAPD), 14-18 Jul 2019; Related Information: ISBN 9780128185971; ISSN 1570-7946
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

42 ENGINEERING
Process intensification
Process Synthesis
Building Blocks
Distillation
MINLP