Eco-Efficient Self-Heat Recuperative Vapor Recompression-Assisted Side-Stream Pressure-Swing Distillation Arrangement for Separating a Minimum-Boiling Azeotrope

The feasibility and performance of the strengthened vapor recompression-assisted side-stream pressure-swing distillation configuration with preheating and/or precooling the column feed stream(s) to the bubble point are assessed with separating minimum-boiling ethyl acetate and ethanol azeotrope as an illustrative example. The efficient analysis tool of heat exchanger network synthesis is used to achieve reasonable heat recovery within the process and reduce the unnecessary utility consumptions. The self-heat recuperative vapor recompression-assisted side-stream pressure-swing distillation arrangement with pretreating all feed streams to their bubble points, as the eco-efficient flowsheet, can achieve reductions of 72.62% in energy consumption rates, 89.84% in CO2 emissions, and 24.92% in total annual cost (TAC) as well as an enhancement of 253.47% in thermodynamic efficiency when compared to the conventional side-stream pressure-swing distillation process. Besides, a method that can quickly determine the best combination of pretreating feed stream(s) to bubble point(s) is given, which can potentially reduce the calculation complexity.