Reclamation of Halon 1301 using industrial-scale heat-pump-assisted batch distillation: Design, simulation, and experiment

Abstract

In this study, the reclamation of Halon 1301 from an industrial waste gas mixture using an existing heat-pump-assisted batch distillation system was investigated. A cold water circuit and a hot water circuit are added to the conventional vapor compression heat pump for easy operation. To design and optimize the separation, where several design variables and constraints must be verified and satisfied, a modification of the design methodology proposed by Long et al. (2020) was used. Following design using Aspen Hysys software in the simulation of the shortcut column and heat pump system and Aspen Batch Modeler in the simulation of batch distillation, experimental operation of the existing heat-pump-assisted batch distillation system was performed to purify Halon 1301. The experimental performance matched well with that in the simulation. The purification of Halon 1301 with purity of 99.9% was accomplished after 22 h under the designed and optimized operating conditions. The results show that the reboiler duty and operating costs of the existing industrial system can be saved by as much as 100.0% and 36.5%, respectively, compared with a conventional batch distillation column. In addition, the total CO2 emission was reduced by as much as 43.7% compared with that of the conventional process. Moreover, the proposed design is convenient and gives reliable performance. This study demonstrated that the use of an advanced distillation configuration in industrial applications is practically viable and economical.