Graphical tools for designing intensified distillation processes: Methods and applications

This chapter will focus on application of graphical tools in designing intensified distillation units. The use of intensified distillation units in industry has been steadily rising due to their economic and environment benefits. The objective of this chapter is to illustrate how established shortcut graphical tools can be easily adopted to design and develop intensified distillation columns.

The outstanding feature of graphical methods is their intuitiveness that makes them more convenient to use than mathematical models. As such, graphical tools can help save time and computational costs in comparison to the use of mathematical model-based optimization. To this end, this chapter will cover the application of extended McCabe-Thiele and Ponchon-Savarit on heat-integrated distillation columns (HIDiC) and the application of driving force approach on cyclic and reactive distillation.

For each type of the abovementioned intensified columns, an algorithmic toolbox is provided and a case study is introduced to verify the implemented method. The results of the application examples can be easily reproduced by following the corresponding toolbox. This chapter will also discuss the advantages of using such simple graphical methods in process design as well as the apparent disadvantages.