Improving the performance of heterogeneous azeotropic distillation via self-heat recuperation technology

Abstract

Azeotropic distillation is one of the most energy intensive processes and widely used to separate thermos-sensitive azeotropes. In this work, several heterogeneous azeotropic distillation processes based on the vapor recompression heat pump (VRHP) and self-heat recuperation technology (SHRT) are proposed to study the energy-saving performance. The results show that the heterogeneous azeotropic distillation process based on self-heat recuperation technology (HAD-SHRT) has better performance in economic and environment. In HAD-SHRT process, the sensible heat and latent heat of the vapor streams are recuperated and supplied to the reboilers. The remaining sensible heat is supplied to the preheaters through the heat exchanger network (HEN). Adding a preheater can reduce the duty of compressor by increasing the initial temperature of the stream. Compared with the conventional heterogeneous distillation process, the HAD-SHRT process can save 38.50% of TAC, 93.30% of CO2 emissions, and 80.92% of energy consumption. The thermodynamic efficiency can increase to 13.51%.