HEURISTIC-PROCEDURE FOR THE SYNTHESIS OF DISTILLATION SEQUENCES WITH MULTICOMPONENT PRODUCTS

A heuristic procedure for the synthesis of multicomponent products distillation sequences with bypassing, splitting and blending is proposed, in which the influences of the current separation and the successive separations on the objective function are considered simultaneously in order to overcome the difficulty of handling contradiction and overlap among the heuristic rules. The synthesis procedure is based on the operation of the separation product matrix representing the products. Three examples are solved to show the effectiveness of the proposed method, in particular its applicability to general distillation synthesis problems. It is obvious, from the illustrated problems, that the procedure proposed needs much less computation in comparison with some algorithms published.