Multicomponent Distillation Configurations with Large Energy Savings

In industry, many separation processes involve the separation of multicomponent mixtures using distillation. There are many distillation configurations that can carry out the same overall separation process. These configurations use an equal number of distillation columns, but they differ significantly in energy consumption. Therefore a major challenge for a practitioner is the identification of energy-optimal configurations for a given application. We describe an easy-to-use matrix-based framework to identify all feasible candidate configurations for the separation of any non-azeotropic multicomponent mixture. We also describe an optimization framework to rank-list all feasible configurations with respect to energy consumption. We have demonstrated the efficacy of these frameworks by identifying more than 70 new configurations that can lower the energy consumption for petroleum crude distillation by 5 – 48%. We also present a framework to analyze operability of distillation sequences.