Separation of mixtures chemicals, ubiquitous in chemical and petrochemical industries, by distillation is energy intensive. Nearly 3% the overall used for United States. Improving process crucial making industries more sustainable. However, designing sequences challenging because choice set vast, equations governing physical are highly nonconvex. Traditional design practices rely on heuristics ...

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...

Abstract This paper describes an optimization procedure for the synthesis of complex distillation configurations. A superstructure based on the Reversible Distillation Sequence Model (RDSM) is proposed embedding all possible alternative designs using tray-by-tray models. Generalized Disjunctive Programming (GDP) is used to model the superstructure. Due to the large size and complexity of the fo...

In this work the distillation column sequencing problem is addressed through the Generalized Modular Framework, based on formal superstructure optimization techniques. The proposed method overcomes structural complexities through the use of systematically composed structural models incorporating all the feasible sequencing alternatives. The generated sequences are evaluated with respect to thei...

We experimentally demonstrate the two-step distillation of entanglement. The output of a first distillation stage underwent a second distillation step and was made available for subsequent steps. Our experiment displays the realization of the building blocks required for an entanglement distillation scheme that can fully overcome decoherence.

Cache hierarchies play a very important role in bridging the speed gap between processors and memory. As this gap increases, it becomes increasingly important to intelligently design and manage a cache system. The performance of current caches is reduced because more than half of the data that is brought into the cache is never referenced, resulting in very low utilization. We propose line dist...

Essential oils have increasing importance in flavour and fragrance industries. They are obtained by distillation techniques. In order to produce an oil with market potential its optimum production parameters have to be well known prior to its commercial production. Determination of the steam distillation parameters of commercially available Laurel leaves oil in pilot plant scale is described. T...

Reactive distillation has received intense attention due to the well known benefits of integrating distillation with reaction in a single unit. While there are procedures available for the synthesis of non-reactive columns and of reaction-separation systems, the design of reactive distillation columns is still a challenge. This work presents a new synthesis and design methodology for reactive d...