A comparative study for solution methods of a multicomponent distillation model

The research on modeling of distillation processes is over 30 years. The equilibrium-stage-based model is widely adopted to describe the distillation process because of its simpleness and convenience. There are many solution methods for these distillation models, however, for different distillation systems, especially for complex multi-component distillation, these methods have different applicable occasions. The selection of solution methods is therefore a very important issue in this research field. We model a multi-component distillation column which has 36 stages and more than 300 components involved. Three solution methods for the distillation model are investigated to demonstrate some guidelines in method selection.