Advances in MINLP to Identify Energy-Efficient Distillation Configurations

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 often result suboptimal solutions. Tumbalam Gooty et al. present first approach that reliably identifies sequence requires least a given separation. By embedding convex hulls substructures adapting reformulation-linearization technique to fractions polynomials, they demonstrated their outperforms state-of-the-art. Their work will help industry reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with distillation.