Abstract
Distillation is the most widely used industrial separation technology and distillation units are responsible for a significant part of the total heat consumption in the world’s process industry. In this work we focus on directly (fully thermally) coupled column arrangements for separation of multicomponent mixtures. These systems are also denoted Petlyuk arrangements, where a particular implementation is the dividing wall column. Energy savings in the range of 20-40% have been reported with ternary feed mixtures. In addition to energy savings, such integrated units have also a potential for reduced capital cost, making them extra attractive. However, the industrial use has been limited, and difficulties in design and control have been reported as the main reasons. Minimum energy results have only been available for ternary feed mixtures and sharp product splits. This motivates further research in this area, and this thesis will hopefully give some contributions to better understanding of complex column systems. In the first part we derive the general analytic solution for minimum energy consumption in directly coupled columns for a multicomponent feed and any number of products. To our knowledge, this is a new contribution in the field. The basic assumptions are constant relative volatility, constant pressure and constant molar flows and the derivation is based on Underwood’s classical methods. An important conclusion is that the minimum energy consumption in a complex directly integrated multi-product arrangement is the same as for the most difficult split between any pair of the specified products when we consider the performance of a conventional two-product column. We also present the Vmin-diagram, which is a simple graphical tool for visualisation of minimum energy related to feed distribution. The Vmin-diagram provides a simple mean to assess the detailed flow requirements for all parts of a complex directly coupled arrangement. In part 2 we focus on optimizati
