An effective procedure for optimized design of heat pump distillation process

Abstract

Research on heat pump-assisted (HP) distillation columns, especially those applied to divided-wall column (DWC), is increasing due to their potential for energy savings in distillation processes. HP systems offer various configurations and multiple decision variables, which increase computational demands across different distillation systems. In this contribution, a heat pump superstructure (HPS) method is developed and proposed that includes five common HP configurations. Combined with an improved differential evolution algorithm, the optimal HP structure in multiple configurations for different optimization tasks is automatically computed. The advantage of HPS method is that it could be incorporated in distillation columns to systematically and simply find an optimum configuration for various separator systems and separation tasks. The HPS effectively achieves optimal design configurations for binary columns, three-component DWCs, and four-component KDWC separation systems under varying pricing standards.