An effective procedure for the development of vapor recompressed Kaibel dividing-wall distillation columns

While combining the Kaibel dividing-wall distillation column (KDWDC) with vapor recompression heat pumps (VRHPs) represents a promising way of process intensification, it faces great complexity, computational in-tensity, and tediousness. In this work, based on its thermodynamic characteristics, an effective procedure is proposed for the development of the VRHP assisted KDWDC (VRHP-KDWDC) processing a wide boiling-point quaternary mixture. The VRHP-KDWDC should be derived following the decreasing order of temperatures of the available heat sources. More specifically, while the first step is to explore the economic feasibility of process intensification by the vapor stream of the second intermediate product, the second step by the vapor stream extracted from the common rectifying section. The procedure allows maximizing the performance of the VRHP-KDWDC with rather low complication, computational intensity, and tediousness. The separations of four wide boiling-point quaternary mixtures, including benzene, toluene, o-xylene, and tri-methyl-benzene and n-pentane, n-hexane, n-heptane, and n-octane with and without component dominance in feed, are studied to evaluate the proposed procedure and the outcomes all demonstrate its simplicity, effectiveness, and efficiency. The proposed procedure is also applicable to the development of the VRHP-DWDC processing a ternary mixture and other complicated VRHP-KDWDCs processing a mixture with more than four components.

Automated summary

An effective procedure is proposed for the development of a vapor recompression heat pump (VRHP) assisted Kaibel dividing-wall distillation column (KDWDC) based on its thermodynamic characteristics. The procedure allows for the maximum performance of the VRHP-KDWDC with low complexity and computational intensity. The outcomes of the procedure demonstrate its simplicity, effectiveness, and efficiency in separating wide boiling-point quaternary mixtures.