Simulation of a Steady-State Ternary Distillation Column

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Consider a steady-state ternary mixture of benzene (), toluene (
), and
-xylene (
) at
. This mixture, with a thermal quality equal to 1.0 (i.e. saturated liquid), is fed to a 19-stage column with a total condenser and partial reboiler. The feed is at stage 10. The feed flow rate is set to
. You can set the values of the reflux and reboil ratios (
and
, respectively). This Demonstration computes the temperature and composition profiles using a rigorous approach, which includes both the energy and mass balances. The blue, magenta, and brown curves, shown in the composition profile, correspond to benzene, toluene, and
-xylene compositions, respectively. For
and
, the results found in the present Demonstration show good agreement with those given by HYSYS (http://www.aspentech.com/hysys/). HYSYS data is shown with colored dots. The calculation of enthalpies can be improved by taking temperature-dependent heat capacity, for example.
Contributed by: Housam Binous (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
Reference
[1] P. C. Wankat, Separation Process Engineering, 2nd ed., Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007.
Permanent Citation
"Simulation of a Steady-State Ternary Distillation Column"
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/SimulationOfASteadyStateTernaryDistillationColumn/
Wolfram Demonstrations Project
Published: March 7 2011