Simulated annealing-based optimal design of energy efficient ternary extractive dividing wall distillation process for separating benzene-isopropanol-water mixtures

This article investigates the performances of different extractive distillation processes intensified with dividing-wall column for separating benzene-isopropanol-water ternary mixtures. All the processes with ethylene glycol as solvent are optimized with the minimal total annual cost (TAC) as target. In order to get the global optimal solution intelligently, an improved simulated annealing algorithm is adopted, which is programmed in MATLAB and linked to Aspen Plus. The results show that the extractive dividing wall column-solvent (EDWC-S) process consisting of an extractive dividing wall column and a solvent recovery column is the best scheme. It can reduce the TAC by 28.65％and CO2 emissions by 32.84％com-pared to the conventional triple-column extractive distillation process.