Design of a Packed Distillation Column for a Unit Operations Laboratory

The design for a new packed distillation column for consideration as a new experiment for the University Of Florida Department Of Chemical Engineering Unit Operations Laboratory was created to demonstrate the separation of water and isopropanol (i-Pr) and to evaluate a parallel applied multi-correlation approach to creating a high accuracy process model based on correlations with known margins of error. The final design produced features a core distillation unit, capable of batch, semi-batch, and continuous operation, and a surrounding recycle and waste management system, which is not covered in this paper. The nominal core system configuration was continuous operation with 20 mol% i-Pr, 10 mol% i-Pr, and 60 mol% i-Pr compositions and 10.4 USGPH, 6.6 USGPH, and 3.9 USGPH flow rates for the feed, bottoms, and distillate material streams, respectively. This configuration had a 6.65 inch tall HTU, requires 3.42 NTU, and a minimum required height of 1.89 ft. The final column design used a 6 ft high packing of 1⁄4 in. Raschig Rings and had a 23.1% nominal “average tray efficiency,” which was an expectedly low value due to the presence of an azeotrope at 67 mol% i-Pr. P D C D e s i g n P a g e | 3 Table of