Simulation-based heat performance evaluation of traditional and divided wall heat integrated distillation column for separation of BTX mixture

Abstract

To improve the effectiveness of the distillation process, a number of different approaches have been suggested, and the divided wall column is one of the techniques that have been taken into consideration. When dealing with multicomponent systems that demand high purity, it is common practice to employ an array of distillation columns for efficiently separating the components into multiple product streams. In order to limit the overall number of columns and space in this investigation, the simulation that is performed in the Aspen plus program makes use of four columns in a divided wall sequence. The current study investigates the process of separating benzene-toluene-p-Xylene (BTX) utilizing the suggested design. In order to attain the highest possible product purity, the operating variables including the number of trays, reflux ratio, splitting ratio, and input composition have been optimized. Using Aspen Plus V8.8, the Sequential Quadratic Programming approach is used to optimize the parameters for optimal product purity. The vapour recompression approach has been utilized for heat integration in the divided wall column system. When compared to the standard distillation column, this technique results in a substantial decrease in the consumption of energy, particularly by 38.48%. The structure being discussed is referred to as a divided wall heat integrated distillation column (HIDiC). The results demonstrate that the product purity obtained with both configurations is 0.99 for benzene, 0.92 for toluene, and 0.97 for p-xylene.