Concept of a Flexible Wetted-Wall Column for the Distillation of Specialty Chemicals

The trend of increasing product diversity and decreasing production amounts led to the requirement of higher flexibility of production processes of specialty chemicals. Conventional distillation columns, mostly equipped with structured packings, lack the flexibility to handle product changeovers and throughput. Thus, a newly designed distillation column for specialty chemicals is presented. A numerical model was implemented to analyze the potential of the wetted-wall column. The simulation of the distillation of a binary methanol/water mixture demonstrated that the wetted-wall column can generate the desired concentration and temperature profiles. Furthermore, analyses of the pressure drop and separation efficiency with the test system chlorobenzene/ethylbenzene were conducted.