Energy saving and thermodynamic efficiency of a double-effect distillation column using internal heat integration

The existing internally heat-integrated distillation column with the problem of utilizing a compressor is modified to propose a new heat-integrated distillation column without the compressor. Two identical columns of a conventional binary distillation are implemented to the heat integration. The energy used in the reboiler is recovered by the internal heat integration between the stripping section of one of the columns at lower pressure and the rectifying section of the other higher pressure column. The heat integration is similar to double-effect distillation, but internal heat integration requires less pressure elevation. The performance of energy saving and thermal efficiency improvement of the proposed system is evaluated with the two examples of the benzene-toluene and methanol-ethanol processes. The performance comparison indicates that the proposed system requires 17.4% less of reboiler duty for the benzene-toluene process and 15.8% less of heating duty for the methanol-ethanol process. The thermal efficiencies are 16.3% and 23.8% for the benzene-toluene and methanol-ethanol processes, respectively. Elimination of the compressor makes the column operation easy and the separate reboilers and condensers for the two columns in the proposed system provide flexible control, when the controllability of the proposed system is compared with that of the existing internally heat-integrated distillation column.