A simple design method for multicomponent distillation columns

Multicomponent-distillation calculation methods are classified as rating or design methods. A few rating methods are widely used but none of the design methods has found general acceptance. Recently, a few design methods have been proposed using the stage-tostage calculations and starting from one of the ends of the column, but they require tedious calculations. We present here a simple design method in which the stage-to-stage calculations are initiated from the feed stage with the feed composition. The method permits the use of component or matrix tray efficiencies or the nonequilibrium-stage model to estimate the number of stages. We have studied the convergence behavior of the proposed method for several systems. The convergence was achieved in all the cases within 3-20 iterations taking CPU time in the order of 100 of a second on a PC with a Pentium 4 processor. ------------------------------------------------------------------------* Corresponding author. Tel.:+91-512-2597873 Fax: +91-512-2590104 E-mail address: [email protected] (D.P.Rao)