Distillation-based separation systems heuristics

From exhaustive application of alternative simple distillation operators to all possible separations for this four-component system, or from application of ranked-list-based separations synthesis methods, it is easily shown that there are five different separation train structures for this four-component problem. Each can be generated systematically or since this pattern of solutions is already well known, each can be written down immediately or design heuristics can be used to generate one or more of the structures expected to be most suitable. After each structure is synthesized, its performance can be analyzed and evaluated with a flowsheet simulator. 

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