Otimização e estudo de colunas de destilação com parede dividida para separações extrativas.

Abstract

In the context of industrial processes, there is a growing need to work with ever more compact and energy-efficient plants. In view of this, divided wall columns (DWC) are seen as promising alternatives in the improvement of distillation columns. However, there are still some doubts regarding this technology, especially when related to extractive distillation. This work was divided into two main parts. In the first part, the present work proposes a procedure of unconventional optimization of the parameters of the conventional columns (CS) and DWC with the aim of minimizing the total annual cost (TAC) in the extractive distillation. The optimization procedure proposed here presented lower TAC results compared to the literature results. In addition, it was possible to achieve the global minimum for the analyzed configurations and, finally, it was possible to make a rigorous comparison between the CS and DWC configurations. The results showed that DWC is not much superior to CS for extractive distillation. The second part of this work studied as the phenomenon of heat transfer through the partition wall in the extractive distillation and the positioning of the partition wall along the column influence the performance of the extractive distillation. This subject has been neglected and not well discussed. In this context, this work evaluated these variables on the energy demand and the total annual cost in extractive distillation. To carry out this analysis, a new methodology was developed and applied to the separation of azeotropic mixtures. The results obtained proved quantitatively that regardless of the position of the partition wall, the heat transfer along the wall in the extractive DWC has no significant influence on the energy demand and the total annual cost.