(335o) Global Feasibility Test for Complex Column Design

Recently there is an increased interest in complex column network synthesis. The reason for this is that complex columns appear to produce given separations with much lower energy than necessary for simple column configurations. However the synthesis of the complex columns which have more than one product and intermediate products gives rise to so called complex column sections, which do not end at distillate and bottom but traverse and generalize column profile maps. Finding out specific cases that are feasible or more aggressively optimal in some sense like energy savings or total analyzed cost is the challenging synthesis task. We propose the advances in global optimization of using progress toward the synthesis of the complex column network which uses global feasibility test having shortcut and rigorous steps for complex column designs. Also we show progress toward a systematic synthesis of complex columns for the purpose of minimizing energy demand for distillative separations. In the course of tasks we use the advantages of the bubble point distance function. This function can be generalized for complex column sections and allow us to search designs of the synthesis in reduced search space. As a result our global feasibility test gives us successful outcomes toward identifying feasible columns as well as toward the optimization of entire network.