Indian Journal of Chemical Technology, Vol.26, No.5, 449-453, 2019
Heat integrated process design for pressure swing distillation columns
Reduction of overall operating energy required in a chemical plant at the designed production rate is a highly sought goal at present. Due to the higher operational costs of distillation units in a chemical plant, there is an urgency to design and demonstrate advance 'greener' and 'innovative' processes to ensure sustainability. The objective of reducing the energy consumption in distillation processes is being considered at the utmost priority. The present work highlights the efforts to design and implement separation process consisting of distillation columns using heat integration concept. Instead of relying on the other traditional or new methods of separation, we envision saving energy via implementing heat integrations in a pressure swing distillation process for separating Tetrahydrofuran-water azeotropic mixture through the presented case study. The significant feature of this work includes evaluation of the most important design variable that is, operating pressure for high pressure column of Pressure-swing distillation (PSD). Conventional PSD process has been compared with that of heat integrated process in terms of the Total Annualized Costs (TAC) as well as heat duties. Further, it has been found that the heat integration has led to 12.7 % savings in TAC and 50.39% reduction in terms of heat duties.