A novel simplified configuration for an ideal heat-integrated distillation column (ideal HIDiC)

Although the ideal heat-integrated distillation column (ideal HIDiC) is much more thermodynamically efficient than its conventional analogues, its applications in the chemical and petrochemical process industries have been restrained due to the great difficulties and complexities in the design and implementation of internal heat integration between the rectifying section and the stripping section. For the avoidance of these difficulties and complexities, a novel simplified configuration for the ideal HIDiC, termed the SIHIDiC, is proposed and studied in this paper. Only three internal heat exchangers are used to approximate the internal heat integration, and their locations and sizes are key decision variables for process synthesis and design and should be considered to enhance thermodynamic efficiency in process development. A simple stepwise procedure is thus derived for process synthesis and design, and the SIHIDiC is then evaluated through intensive comparison with conventional distillation columns and the ideal HIDiC in terms of the separations of ethylene/ethane and benzene/toluene binary mixtures. The results obtained indicate that the SIHIDiC could be an excellent candidate to approximate the ideal HIDiC with reduced capital investment and somewhat similar (if not smaller) operating cost. The SIHIDiC offers essentially a much simpler way than the current available methods to design and implement the concept of the ideal HIDiC into separation processes. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.