The concept of exergy has been introduced to establish a universal standard for quality and efficient use of energy. In this work, applications of this concept to compression, heat exchange, and separation processes, in addition to the computation of their irreversibility rate and thermodynamic efficiency, are considered. An industrial case study on the purification of 1,2-ethylenedichloride (EDC) in a high-purity distillation column is presented. Due to its large throughput, this distillation column consumes a large amount of thermal energy (steam to the reboiler) and in order to reduce the energy requirements without large process modifications, a new configuration using a vapour compression heat pump is proposed which yields considerable improvement in the use of energy. Both configurations were implemented using the commercial simulator Aspen Plus TM; the results of the original configuration were validated with data extracted from the plant. The objective of this work was to compare the original configuration and the new proposed one, from a thermodynamic approach. Furthermore, two forms of process thermodynamic analysis based on the concept of exergy were applied to the new proposed configuration. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.