Sustainable optimization of acetone-water distillation: Balancing cost, flexibility, and environmental impact with heat pump integration

Abstract

Acetone is extensively used in industrial applications due to its high polarity and miscibility. However, its separation from water becomes increasingly energy-intensive at high concentrations beyond a mass fraction of 0.8, where the relative volatility significantly decreases. This study introduces an innovative heat pump-assisted distillation system (HPADS) coupled with a novel bi-objective optimization framework that simultaneously considers economic efficiency and operational flexibility—an aspect often neglected in prior studies. Leveraging the integration of Aspen Plus® and MATLAB®, the proposed system enables automated, parallelized optimization using a genetic algorithm (GA), with a custom objective function that includes both total annual cost (TAC) and a flexibility index (FI). This approach ensures not only minimum cost but also robust performance under feed disturbances. The optimized HPADS achieves up to 16.25 % flexibility in feed variation tolerance, reduces operating costs by 57.78 %, and cuts annual CO₂ emissions by 3.83 × 10⁶ kg compared to conventional systems. The results demonstrate that embedding flexibility into process design enhances both sustainability and resilience, positioning the proposed HPADS framework as a significant advancement toward practical, energy-efficient, and disturbance-tolerant distillation systems.