Numerical Determination of Distillation Boundaries for Multicomponent Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Azeotropic Systems

摘要

As it is very well known, especially when dealing with the planning and operation ofrndistillation processes and equipment, it is essential to characterise the intrinsicrnlimitations due to the VL equilibrium of the system under consideration. This paperrnaddresses a new approach to directly and numerically calculate the distillationrnboundaries present in ternary and quaternary azeotropic systems, simply involving thernconcept that such boundaries are distillation trajectories passing through specificrnsingular points. To generate the tested distillation trajectories, that after the optimizationrnprocess will be the searched boundary, we use cubic splines and polynomial equationsrn(although any other adequate equation could be used). The commercial softwarernpackage Simulis Thermodynamics (ProSim) has been used to calculate the VLE usingrnthe available thermodynamic models such as NRTL and UNIFAQ.