Simulation Of Fully Thermally Coupled Distillation Columns For Multi-component Mixture Separation

Fully thermally coupled distillation columns (FTC, or Petlyuk) can reduce energy consumption and capital investment comparing to conventional distillation consequences for separation of ternary and/or multi-components mixtures. With the application of Aspen Plus software, rigorous simulations were firstly performed to the fully thermally coupled distillation columns for ternary hydrocarbon mixture separation, focusing on how middle component fractional recovery influences overall expense under the conditions of different feed compositions and diverse relative volatilities. The simulation comes through with the optimal values of middle component fractional recovery obtained for different feed conditions, including feed composition and feed relative volatility. The results show that the fractional recovery is a key factor for the energy consumption, of which best value depends on the feed conditions. Simultaneously, the design procedure was given as well. As rigorous simulation was employed,the results would be helpful for practical design and control of FTC columns. Based on the simulation of ternary hydrocarbon mixture separation, the same procedure was performed on quaternary mixtures as well. For both ternary and quaternary mixture separation, we draw the similar conclusion that the fully thermally coupled distillation separation has close optimal strategy as the synthesis of separation sequences.