(520d) Improving Themal Efficiency and CO2 Emission of the Dividing Wall Column

This work aims at analyzing the performance enhancement of a dividing wall column for the separation of a ternary system. It is true that to fractionate a ternary mixture, at least two conventional distillation columns are required, which are arranged in a sequence. In the light of improving its energetic and economic potential, and at the same time to reduce space requirement, two towers are proposed to merge into one column with a dividing wall and it is named as dividing wall column (DWC). The dividing wall is placed at an intermediated position inside the cylindrical shell and the mathematical model of this column is developed by considering heat transfer through that metal wall. The DWC model is simulated and verified using the Aspen Plus flowsheet simulator. For a ternary hydrocarbon mixture, the dominance of this proposed heat integrated structure over a conventional distillation sequence (CDS) is evaluated in the context of mainly two performance indicators, namely thermal efficiency and carbon dioxide emission. It is investigated that the proposed dividing wall column improves the thermal efficiency by 37.5%. The attractiveness of the proposed DWC can also be measured by its potential in reducing CO₂ emission level that is obtained 22.59% for the sample case.