Thermal Coupling in Multicomponent Distillation Sequences

Thermal coupling is very attractive because it has potential to significantly reduce the energy consumption of a basic distillation configuration. We have developed a simple method to quickly synthesize all the low energy distillation sequences with and without thermal coupling. The goal of this work is to identify causes for reduction of energy consumption in these sequences, and to describe insights for thermal coupling in distillation configurations.

This problem is quite important, because even for mature commercial applications like petroleum crude distillation, we have identified a number of distillation configurations with potential energy savings in excess of 10%. Most of these distillation configurations involve thermal coupling.