Comparison of Energy used by Side Columns and Conventional Columns for ternary mixture separation

Abstract

Distillation is one of the most used unit operation in chemical industry, which is based on the separation of mixtures of two of more components based upon their respective boiling points. In a separation of an ideal ternary mixture two sharp splits distillation columns sequences are widely used, the direct one and the indirect one, but negative point of types of sequence are that they consume a lot of energy to make the desired separation possible. In order to reduce the overall operational costs and make this separation energetically efficient, columns with side rectifiers and side strippers were proposed but unfortunately the advantages of this sort of columns is not clear from the published literature, therefore the use of these columns is very limited. The basic aim of this work is the comparison between the amount of energy consumed in the separation of ideal ternary mixture by the conventional process schemes and the intensified columns with side columns, in order to find when the intensification could have a higher potential and advantages to be implemented. A rigorous simulation of three different types of ideal ternary mixtures is performed in Aspen with conventional and intensified methods to make a comparison between them