The choice of control structures for distillation columns is important for practical industrial operation. There is no single ‘best’ structure for all columns, so some authors feel that each column should be treated independently. Nevertheless, the objective of this work is to find a structure that is ‘reasonable’ for all columns. In this paper, we consider the steady-state deviations in produc...

Semicontinuous distillation is a process intensification technique for purification of multicomponent mixtures. The system is control-driven and thus the control structure and its tuning parameters have crucial importance in the operation and the economics of the process. In this study, for the first time, implementation of the model predictive control (MPC) on a semicontinuous process is studi...

This paper examines alternative models for the economic optimization of multicomponent distillation columns. Different column representations are modeled involving rigorous MINLP (Mixed Integer Nonlinear Programming) and GDP (General Disjunctive Programming) formulations. The different representations involve various ways of representing the choices for the number of trays and feed tray locatio...

Batch industries, specially the fine chemical industry, need rapid and robust mathematical models that can easily predict the degree of separation of mixtures like volatile organic compounds. Otherwise, in the study of on line production scheduling and planning of fine chemical plants, there is a lack of quick but reliable and more accurate than black box models in batch distillation. In this w...