Progress in synthesis of multi-component distillation sequence

Distillation sequence synthesis is a manipulation to deal with mixture that can separate mixture to target purity product with the minimum capital cost.In this article,four methods of distillation sequence synthesis are summarized:Knowledge-based approache,Thermodynamic approach,Mathematical programming approach and Stochastic optimization approach..Basic principles,advantage and short ages of these four methods are discussed.Synthesis of complex distillation systems and heat integrated distillation sequence synthesis are the promising direction of the synthesis of multi-component distillation systems.