Comparison of shortcut methods for designing of divided wall columns for separating tertiary zeotropic mixtures

Recently, divided wall column has been considered as one of the types of thermally coupled towers for separating multicomponent mixtures. In the structure of this tower, there is a wall that divides the tower into two parts, the Prefractionator and the Main Column. The divided wall column is thermodynamically equivalent of the Petlyuk tower. Therefore, in order to obtain the design and simulation parameters of the Petlyuk tower utilizing the available software, this tower must be divided into simpler towers. The shortcut method is employed to acquire the initial parameters. In the present research, initially, the design of divided wall column has been conducted using shortcut methods to separate three-component zeotropic mixtures. Next, the design and simulation of the divided wall column is performed employing ASPEN PLUS software and the results of the two methods are compared from various angles.

A Review on AI Control of Reactive Distillation for Various Applications

In this chapter, previous studies on reactive distillation process control including control using conventional as well as soft sensor control, membrane assisted reactive distillation design and simulation, estimation and control are discussed. The review of literature in different dimensions is carried out to explore the opportunities in the field of research work. The chapter is focused on dynamics and control of Reactive distillation, its control using Conventional Techniques, Model Predictive Control MPC), Reactive Distillation using Soft Sensors/Soft Controllers, Membrane assisted reactive distillation, Biodiesel in Reactive Divided Wall Column: Design and Control and Membrane reactive divided wall column. These control techniques are proposed and analyzed by many researchers. These techniques have potential use in process industries to have better soft sensor control of nonlinear processes.

Divided Wall Column Modeling and Simulation in an Open-Source Environment

The divided wall column (DWC) can achieve sharp separations of three or more components in a single shell, substituting conventional sequences of two or more binary<br /> distillation columns, with lower expenses. Despite these advantages, DWC models are not available in commercial chemical process simulators. To simulate DWC, users must employ instances of conventional column model and couple them in different configurations. In this paper, a DWC model was developed in EMSO (Environment for Modeling, Simulation and Optimization). DWC model was then used for simulating the separation of an equimolar mixture of three hydrocarbons. Results show that, depending on the number of trays, DWC presented energy savings compared to two ordinary distillation columns. Better separation was obtained when the number of divided trays was close to half the number of total trays. However, the liquid and vapor flow rates split into the divided section play a key role in the separation.