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...

The heat-integrated distillation column to be addressed in this paper is a special distillation column that involves internal heat integration between the whole rectifying and the whole stripping sections. An overview of the research on this process is presented in this work. It covers from the thermodynamic development and evaluations to the practical design and operation investigations for th...

This article deals with the issues associated with developing a new design methodology for the nonlinear model-predictive control (MPC) of a chemical plant. A combination of multiple neural networks is selected and used to model a nonlinear multi-input multi-output (MIMO) process with time delays.  An optimization procedure for a neural MPC algorithm based on this model is then developed. T...

This work presents a reactive distillation column for the catalytic disproportionation of trichlorosilane to silane which includes three consecutive reversible reactions. This reaction system is however characterized by a large distinction in the boiling points of the components, which make the reactive distillation extremely favored. Nevertheless, the normal reactive distillation column posses...

A reactive distillation column in general can exhibit multiple steady states which reduce column operability and controllability during perturbations of manipulated variables and particularly during start-up and shut down. The objective of this paper was to compare the equilibrium (EQ) and nonequilibrium (NEQ) models of a reactive distillation column, focusing on the phenomenon of multiple stea...

Distillation columns have been widely used in chemical plants for separation process. The high nonlinearity and dynamic behavior of the column make them hard to control. Internal Model Control (IMC) is one of the model based control strategy that have become the central of research to control such column. This paper will review the implementation of IMC in controlling continuous distillation co...

In this contribution, a different pressure thermally coupled extractive distillation process has been applied on the separation of propylene and propane with aqueous acetonitrile (ACN) solution as entrainer. The novel distillation process integration is the combination of different pressure thermally coupled distillation (DPTCD) and extractive distillation (ED). Both the new process and the con...

Extractive distillation is an alternative for ethanol dehydration processes that has been shown to be more effective than azeotropic distillation and, in close proximity, to be very competitive against the process that uses adsorption with molecular sieves. Glycols have been shown to be the most effective solvents in extractive distillation, mainly ethylene glycol and glycerol. In this work, an...

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...