Shortcut Method of Design and Energy-Saving Analysis of Sargent Dividing Wall Column

The Sargent dividing wall column can implement four products separation sequences in one column based on Fully Thermally Coupled Distillation Column. The initial design parameters are required for the design optimization or dynamic control of the Sargent dividing wall column, and in order to make the rigorous simulation of the Sargent dividing wall column more conducive to convergence, a ten column model for complex Sargent column is established in this paper,and the shortcut design method of this model is proposed. The internal minimum vapor and liquid flow are obtained by the Underwood equations and the mass balance method and the V-min method. The separation for a 4-component shortcut mixture of pentane, hexane, heptane and octane was considered, while the initial values of design parameters and the ratio of vapor-liquid distribution of each column were calculated by using the shortcut design method of a ten column model. And by comparing the shortcut calculations with rigorous simulation results, the practicality and reliability of shortcut calculations were verified. The reason for energy saving was analyzed based on back-mixing. A virtual heat exchanger is proposed to make the Sargent dividing wall column more energy efficient.