Petlyuk columns industrial applications

The development of thermally coupled systems started with attempts to find energy-saving schemes for the separation of ternary mixtures into three products. One of the first industrial applications was the side rectifier configuration for air separation. The side stripper configuration followed naturally. By combining the two we obtain the fully thermally coupled system of Petlyuk, Platonov, and Slavinskii [Int. Chem. Eng., 5, 555 (1965)] see Fig. 13-67h. It consists of the prefractionator which accepts the ternary feed stream followed by the main column that produces the products (product column). 

Holland, S.T., et al. Complex column design by application of column profile map techniques Sharp split Petlyuk column design. Industrial Engineering Chemistry Research, 2010, 49(1) 327 349. 

Industrial applications of the divided-wall (Petlyuk) column have expanded, so a new chapter has been added that covers both the design and the control of these more complex coupled columns. The use of dynamic simulations to quantitatively explore the safety issues of rapid transient responses to major process upsets and failures is discussed in a new chapter. A more stmctured approach for selecting an appropriate control structure is outlined to help sort through the overwhelmingly large number of alternative stmctures. A simple distillation column has five factorial (120) alternative structures that need to be trimmed down to a workable number, so that their steady-state and dynamic performances can be compared. 

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