New design procedure for fully thermally coupled distillation columns

A new structural design procedure for fully thermally coupled distillation columns utilizing semi-rigorous material balances is proposed and applied to the design of example systems of butanol, BTX and hexane-heptane mixtures. The performance of the proposed design evaluated from the application results for the three example systems with three different feed compositions indicates that the new procedure gives convenient design information for the commercial design programs. In addition, the location of interlinking trays, feed and side draw is systematically determined.