Study on the Distillation Sequence with Dividing Wall Column for Five-component Separations

Abstract Distillation is one of the primary separation technique widely adopted in process industry. For separating a multicomponent mixture by distillation, a sequence of columns will be required. In this work, distillation sequences with both simple column and dividing wall column (DWC) are contained under the sharp split assumption for five-component separations. A two-level optimization is conducted with the objective of minimum total annual cost. The optimal distillation sequence with DWC can be efficiently identified based on dynamic programming method. In this work, alcohol system is studied to compare with a hydrocarbon system. Based on the optimal distillation sequence obtained, the impact of intermolecular forces is discussed, which could be instructive to reduce optimization computation load of distillation sequence and narrow the searching scope of the optimal position for multicomponent separation DWC. The optimal sequences with DWC included at the last step in five-component hydrocarbon system with various mixture contents are also investigated.