(211d) Opportunities For Reduction Of Energy Consumption In Batch Distillation Processes

Batch distillation is one of the most important unit operations for small- scale production of speciality and fine chemicals.It is also used in pharmaceutical and perfume industries and as well as for laboratory studies. Distillation of any form (Batch,continuous,complex batch,etc)is an energy intensive process and this has a significant effect on the overall cost of production.This paper investigates ways of reducing the energy consumption of a simple conventional binary batch distillation process by finding the Attainable Region method for a binary batch boiling process. The fundamental processes considered are boiling and mixing.It is shown that there is a lower limit to the amount of energy required to produce for a given composition of material from a specified initial material. This limit can be achieve by use of a specified mixing policy where this policy is obtained from the Attainable Region approach. It is shown that using this approach, the binary batch distillation requires significant less energy compared to the conventional batch processes to achieve a particular distillation product.