Minimum energy of multicomponent distillation systems using minimum additional heat and mass integration sections

Heat and mass integration to consolidate distillation columns in a multicomponent distillation configuration can lead to a number of new energy efficient and cost‐effective configurations. In this work, a powerful and simple‐to‐use fact about heat and mass integration is identified. The newly developed heat and mass integrated configurations, which we call as HMP configurations, involve first introducing thermal couplings to all intermediate transfer streams, followed by consolidating columns associated with a lighter pure product reboiler and a heavier pure product condenser. A systematic method of enumerating all HMP configurations is introduced. The energy savings of HMP configurations is compared with the well‐known fully thermally coupled (FTC) configurations. HMP configurations can have very similar and sometimes even the same minimum total vapor duty requirement as the FTC configuration is demonstrated, while using far less number of column sections, intermediate transfer streams, and thermal couplings than the FTC configurations. © 2018 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 64: 3410–3418, 2018