Synthesis of distillation separation process with energy integration

Abstract

Introduction of energy integration into the distillation separation process is very important from the viewpoint of energy saving and cost reduction, but it is difficult to solve these synthesis problems because there exists information feedback between the distillation separation sequence and the heat exchanger network. A useful method composed of thre ephases — decomposition, optimization and selection — is proposed for solving these synthesis problems. The list of distillation separation sequences is effectively used to generate directly only feasible subproblems in the decomposition phase, and to select the optimal distillation separation process among many candidates in the selection phase. In the optimization phase the constrained Simplex method is doubly used to search the optimal solution of the subproblem, in which energy match is considered. A synthesis problem of a 5-component distillation separation process with energy integration demonstrates the effectiveness of this synthesis method. © 1981, The Society of Chemical Engineers, Japan. All rights reserved.