Energy efficient distillation

Distillation is responsible for a significant amount of the energy consumption of the world’s process industry and also in the natural gas processing. There is a significant energy saving potential that can be obtained by applying new energy saving distillation technology that has appeared in the last two decades. The fully thermally coupled dividing wall columns have the attractive feature of both savings in energy consumption and reduction of investment cost. In this paper we give an overview of some energy saving distillation arrangements and show how the Vmin-diagram can be used to assess separations and calculate energy requirements and provide a basis for detailed design. Reduced CO2 emission is an additional benefit that actually comes for free by the reduction of energy consumption.