CHME - UOL - Continuous Distillation

Equipment Specifications

• 12 sieve trays with a partial reboiler and total condenser.
• Saturated or subcooled liquid feed can be fed to tray 1, 7, 12, or directly to the reboiler.
• Column can be operated manually or using the DeltaV™ DCS.
• Thermocouples and sample ports on each tray allow for temperature and liquid composition data to be collected.
• Alarms and interlocks are present for process safety.

Possible Experimental Objectives

• Distillation of binary or tertiary mixture.
• Measuring of pressure drops across each tray using a single component.
• Energy balances to determine heat loss.
• Temperature inferred composition control.
• Feedforward control for disturbances in feed composition or flow rate.
• Process modeling for predicting and fitting data incorporating pressure drop, heat loss, tray efficiency, and non-ideal vapor-liquid equilibrium.