Synthesis And Design Of Dividing Wall Column (DWC)

Industrial production level is a sign of a country is to evaluate whether or not an important indicator of development, and chemical industry in the entire gross national product in the possession of great proportion. The distillation in chemical production is an indispensable link. However, now emerging environmental issues frequently remind us, in the pursuit of high productivity while also taking into account energy conservation. At the same time, the concept of "Green Chemistry" make "energy saving" became an important evaluation of the chemical process indicators.Although thermal coupling between the prefractionator and main distillation columns makes the dividing wall column (DWC) a frequently favorable design option, it also complicates considerably process synthesis and design. In this paper, a simple philosophy for the synthesis and design of the DWC is derived in terms of the gradient information of an economical objective function to the operating (continuous) and structural (discontinuous) decision variables. The philosophy allows the treatment of these two kinds of decision variables in a unified manner and permits searches of their optimum values in a sequential way in each iteration step. It is characterized by great simplicity in principle and high robustness to the initial guess of process configuration and the thermodynamic properties of the mixtures separated. Five example systems separating various ternary mixtures with ideal and non-ideal thermodynamic properties are employed to evaluate the proposed philosophy and the obtained outcomes demonstrate its applicability and robustness to the synthesis and design of the DWC.