Heuristic approach for the synthesis of heat-integrated distillation sequences

Abstract

A simple heuristic approach is developed for the synthesis of thermally coupled distillation trains. The proposed algorithm consists of seven sequential steps. The heat integration matrix for the synthesis problem is generated with the aid of three heuristic rules for identifying the feasible matches between the condenser and reboiler. The impact of both utility and capital costs on heat integration is considered in the analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by two examples. The first example is a synthesis problem concerning a five-component mixture for a sharp separation process, and the second concerns a four-component mixture for a non-sharp separation process. The proposed method yields a high reduction in cost compared with other methods reported in the literature. The method is straightforward to apply by hand and it does not require any mathematical background on computational skills of the user. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.