New Intensified Heat Integration of Vapor Recompression Assisted Dividing Wall Column

Abstract

The energy efficiency of dividing wall column (DWC) can be improved by the vapor recompression (VRC) technology, but large temperature difference between the overhead and bottom of the DWC limits the application of VRC. To fully recover the heat generated by the VRC under large compression ratio, new intensified heat integrations of the VRC assisted DWC are provided in this paper. In the intensified configurations, the reboiler condensed liquid is used to vaporize the side liquid stream in an intermediate reboiler (IR), the overhead vapor is preheated by the subcooled liquid. The best IR position can be gotten by the aid of the column grand composite curves (CGCC) of the DWC. Three separation cases with different ESI values are simulated to validity the energy capacity of the intensified configurations, the results show that the intensified heat integration technolgy can significantly improve the energy efficiency of the DWC with large temperature difference between the overhead and the bottom.