The synthesis of distillation-based separation systems

The last dozen years have produced almost 50 English language articles on the synthesis of separation systems 1]. Most work has considered separating a single relatively ideal mixture into sharply split, usually pure-component products using systems of single-feed, two-product distillation columns. Of late, the work has considered heat-integrating these columns to reduce energy consumption. Present research will very likely produce valuable results for nonsharp separations.Earlier approaches developed both algorithmic- and heuristic-based tree search algorithms for discovering the better systems of non-heat-integrated columns. New results permit the design of heat-integrated systems.The paper highlights the above developments.