Simulation And Optimization Of Fuel Ethanol Three-tower Differential Pressure Distillation Process And Tower Process Design

Fuel ethanol is a kind of green and renewable energy,whose development and utilization provides an effective way to alleviate the lack of fossil fuels such as petroleum etc,to solve the shortage of future vehicle fuel and to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.Therefore,it has important ecological and environmental significance.From the present study,the energy consumption of fuel ethanol production in the distillation section accounted for more than 50%of its total energy consumption.Therefore,we need to use energy reasonably,optimize the process flow and operating parameters of the fuel ethanol production,as far as possible to recover the residual heat and reduce the energy consumption in the production process,which is of great practical significance to its popularization.This paper designs the process of fuel ethanol distillation section,we determined use three tower differential pressure distillation.A special ALCOHOL thermodynamic model was selected according to the physical properties of the raw materials.The vapor liquid equilibrium of ethanol water system at atmospheric pressure was simulated by PRO/?,the results were compared with the literature values,and the average deviation was small.Therefore,the selected thermodynamic model was feasible.Then,the process flow simulation was carried out.The process parameters of the crude distillation column ?,the distillation column ? and the distillation column I was simulated and optimized by using PRO/?respectively,and then determined the optimum operation parameters.Finally,according to the process parameters of each tower to do steady-state simulation of the whole process,and then the material balance and energy balance calculation were performed.The purity of the ethanol product was 95%(?)and the recovery rate was 99.39%in the fuel ethanol distillation section.The whole process heat exchange network of fuel ethanol distillation section was analyzed by pinch technique.The results show that the heat transfer network is set up reasonably.The heating utility is 6603.8kW,and cooling utility is 2054.6kW,which corresponding steam consumption is 1.46t/t azeotropic ethanol product,and circulating cooling water consumption is 22.73t/t azeotropic ethanol products.Compared with the conventional two-tower process,the steam consumption of this process can save up to 36.5%.Finally,do the process design and verification for the main tower equipment.