Methoxy‐methylheptane as a cleaner fuel additive: An energy‐ and cost‐efficient enhancement for separation and purification units

Environmental protection agencies have begun imposing stringent regulations on the existing refineries to control levels of gasoline additives. In this context, a novel compound, 2-methoxy-2-methylheptane (MMH), had drawn attention as fuel additive for cleaner combustion. The conventional process MMH production features three distillation columns in direct sequence. These are used maintain required product purities and utilize unreacted reactants through recycling streams. system plant can afford significant energy savings, leading reduction total annual costs (TAC). aim investigation is demonstrate that reported be significantly enhanced by modifying design operational parameters replacing two with an intensified dividing wall column (DWC) configuration. DWC further optimized using several algorithms such modified coordinate method (MCD), robust particle swarm paradigm (PSP), firefly (FF) nonlinear constraints. Compared process, resulted 24% 11.5% savings operating costs, respectively.