Advances in heat pump assisted distillation column: A review

Progressive depletion of conventional fossil fuels with increasing energy demand and federal laws on environmental emissions have stimulated intensive research in improving energy efficiency of the existing fractionation units. In this light, the heat pump assisted distillation (HPAD) scheme has emerged as an attractive separation technology with great potential for energy saving. This paper aims at providing a state-of-the-art assessment of the research work carried out so far on heat pumping systems and identifies future challenges in this respect. At first, the HPAD technology is introduced with its past progresses that have centered upon column configuration, modeling, design and optimization, economic feasibility and experimental verification for steady state operation. Then the focus is turned to review the progress of a few emerging heat integration approaches that leads to motivate the researchers for further advancement of the HPAD scheme. Presenting the recently developed hybrid HPAD based heat integrated distillation configurations, the feasibility of heat pumping in batch processing is discussed. Finally the work highlights the opportunities and future challenges of the potential methodology. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.