Synthesis of multicomponent distillation column configurations

Abstract A systematic procedure presented here draws distillation column configurations to separate an ideal to near ideal n–component mixture into n product streams with each enriched in one of the components. The method synthesizes all feasible basic configurations using n–1 distillation columns with each column having only a condenser at the top and a reboiler at the bottom. It also generates all feasible thermally coupled schemes with classical two‐way liquid and vapor communication between the distillation columns. The method is simple and easy to use. The advantage of such a method is that it could be incorporated in a search algorithm to systematically find an optimum distillation scheme for a given application.