INTRODUCTION In Japan, Pilot Plant of the HIDiC was built in 2005. It was commercial base scale and already achieved the consecutive distillation for 1000 hours. The energy consumption of the pilot HIDiC was only about 70% of that of a conventional distillation column. The HIDiC can lower reboiler and condenser load by heat exchange between rectifying section and stripping section. Therefore, i...

Reactive distillation is an excellent example of recent advances in process intensification. It combines reaction and separation operations in one piece of equipment. This paper studies the steady-state economic optimum design of a chemical process with a generic exothermic reversible reaction A+B↔C+D for two different process flowsheets: a conventional multi-unit reactor/separator/recycle stru...

HYSYS process modeling software was used to analyze the effect of reflux ratio and number of trays on the purity of ethylene in a vapor recompression distillation column and also in an ordinary distillation column. Analysis of data showed that with increased pressure a higher reflux ratio is needed to obtain a purity of 99.9% for both towers. In addition number of trays was varied to see its ef...

Distillation has remained an important separation technology for the chemical process industries. In 1997 it was reported in the journal Chemical Engineering that about 95% of all worldwide separation processes use this technology. In the USA alone, some 40000 distillation columns represent a capital investment of about US $8 billion. They consume the energy equivalent of approximately 1 billio...

Batch distillation in a column with a middle vessel can avoid many of the disadvantages associated with the regular batch distillation processes. In this paper we present an experimental investigation of the separation of a zeotropic ternary mixture via total reflux operation and of the separation of an azeotropic binary mixture via batchwise extractive distillation. Moreover, the results obtai...

E nergy costs are the largest percentage of a hydrocarbon plant’s operating expenditures. This is especially true of the distillation process, which requires substantial energy consumption. Concerns over recent high costs and economic pressures continually emphasise the need for efficient distillation design and operation without a loss of performance. This article illustrates how energy-effici...

This paper studies the synthesis and the design of methanol recovery system for TAME reactive distillation process using extraction column with water as a solvent. The design of the extraction column system has not been studied in the literature. The effect of operating conditions such as solvent flowrate, extraction column temperature, and number of equilibrium trays are studied. It is found t...