Internally Heat-Integrated Distillation Column (HIDiC)Design by Mathematical Programming Approach

Due to the uprising price of crude oil, the chemical industries with higher energy consumption are forced to face the energy issue. In chemical industries, the distillation processes account for 45% of total energy consumption. Before the renewable energy can replace the fossil energy completely, it is crucial to improve the energy efficiency of present processes. Nowadays there are many studies about distillation process improvement. This thesis will discuss the design of internal energy-integrated distillation processes.
Studies about the internally heat-integrated distillation column (HIDiC) have been investigated for many years. Those studies focused on energy savings of HIDiC. This study will bring up a general and complete model involving energy consumption and total annual costs calculation by mathematical programming approach. It is expected to get balance between energy savings and economical benefits. This model will directly determine the design with minimal TAC and discuss the proper opportunities to use conventional distillation and HIDiC. It is finally discovered that the competitiveness of HIDiC on TAC will increase when the energy price rises suddenly and sharply or the investment cost of the gas compressor and the cost of electricity declines.