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Thermally coupled distillation with reduced number of intercolumn vapor transfers
Author(s) -
Agrawal Rakesh
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
aiche journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.958
H-Index - 167
eISSN - 1547-5905
pISSN - 0001-1541
DOI - 10.1002/aic.690461112
Subject(s) - reboiler , distillation , condenser (optics) , fractionating column , continuous distillation , chemistry , coupling (piping) , heat transfer , thermal , process engineering , thermodynamics , heat exchanger , vacuum distillation , mechanics , mechanical engineering , chromatography , engineering , physics , light source , optics
The classical thermal coupling between two distillation columns requires two‐way communication whereby both vapor and liquid streams are transferred in opposite directions between one specific location in each of the distillation columns. A general framework is presented whereby this classical two‐way thermal coupling is converted to a one‐way liquid‐only transfer. This conversion is achieved by adding one or more distillation sections and a reboiler and/or a condenser with each added section. The resulting equivalent configurations coproduce some of the component product streams from more than one distillation column and are quite flexible. Finally, the techniques developed for this framework are applied to reduce the heat duty of the well‐known conventional distillation column configurations with no thermal coupling.