Residue Curve Map for a Benzene-Toluene-p-Xylene Mixture

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The Demonstration computes the residue curve map for the ternary mixture benzene-toluene-p-xylene. When you change the locator's position, a new residue curve is computed and displayed. Residue curve maps play an important role in the conceptual design of distillation columns.

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The position of the locator gives an initial point from which the simulation runs forward and backward in warped time. The lightest (benzene) and the heaviest (p-xylene) components are the unstable and stable nodes. The distillation gets richer in the heavy components until there is only p-xylene left. The intermediate component (toluene) is a saddle point. All three are extremes of the system of differential equations. If the locator is outside the triangle then the point does not correspond to a realistic mixture (i.e., it has mole fractions that are negative or greater than 1). If the user chooses a locator inside the triangle, its two coordinates correspond to the mole fractions of benzene and p-xylene (. The third (toluene’s) mole fraction is . The plot is the residue curve of the ternary mixture that represents the composition of the distillation still versus warped time.

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Contributed by: Housam Binous (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


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For more information, see:

M. F. Doherty and M. F. Malone, Conceptual Design of Distillation Systems, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001.



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