Comparison of shortcut methods for designing of divided wall columns for separating tertiary zeotropic mixtures

Abstract

Recently, divided wall column has been considered as one of the types of thermally coupled towers for separating multicomponent mixtures. In the structure of this tower, there is a wall that divides the tower into two parts, the Prefractionator and the Main Column. The divided wall column is thermodynamically equivalent of the Petlyuk tower. Therefore, in order to obtain the design and simulation parameters of the Petlyuk tower utilizing the available software, this tower must be divided into simpler towers. The shortcut method is employed to acquire the initial parameters. In the present research, initially, the design of divided wall column has been conducted using shortcut methods to separate three-component zeotropic mixtures. Next, the design and simulation of the divided wall column is performed employing ASPEN PLUS software and the results of the two methods are compared from various angles.