The distillation unit is one of the main units in refning companies, and it serves as the mother unit in any refnery with any degree of complexity. The optimization of this unit can increase productivity. In this study, the vacuum distillation unit of a refnery was selected as the case study. The shares of different expenses of this unit were clarifed using a novel material flow cost accoun...

One approach to active learning involves taking students through a guided exploration process; one which ensures students will observe phenomena and then be asked questions intended to draw conclusions regarding the observations. In recent years, this has been called inductive teaching, but more recently the expression “inquiry-based instruction” or related terms have become more common. Concur...

A study of the influence of distillation system, oak wood type, and aging time on volatile compounds of cider brandy was carried out. Acetaldehyde and acetaldehyde diethyl acetal were influenced by distillation technology, oak wood type, and maturation time. The majority ester, ethyl ethanoate, increased during aging, the highest level of this ester being detected in spirits distilled by double...

extended kalman filtering (ekf) is a nonlinear dynamic data reconciliation (nddr) method. one of its main advantages is its suitability for on-line applications. this paper presents an on-line nddr method using ekf. it is implemented for two case studies, temperature measurements of a distillation column and concentration measurements of a cstr. in each time step, random numbers with zero mean ...

in general, the objective of distillation control is to maintain the desired products quality. in this paper, the performances of different one point control strategies for an aromatic distillation column have been compared through dynamic simulation. these methods are: a) composition control using measured composition directly. this method sufferes from large sampling delay of measuring device...

The esterification reaction between acetic acid and butanol was investigated in a reactive distillation column. The thermodynamic aspects of considered system are discussed, equilibrium constant, vapor pressures and UNIQUAC interaction parameters were investigated. Reactive distillation experiments were carried out to provide high purity butyl acetate. For this purpose, a 2 m column with nonrea...

An unconstrained model predictive control (MPC) strategy is presented for single input-single output (SISO) control of a reactive distillation column. The predictive model of the MPC is based on the autoregressive moving average (ARX) model structure, whose parameters are updated on-line using the process measurement information. The design and performance of the control strategy is evaluated b...