This study presents the synthesis and design of a two-column compact distillation (CD) process for separating a dilute ethyl acetate (EtAc)–methanol (MeOH)–water mixture, which has two minimum boiling azeotropes, into its constituent (nearly) pure components. The synthesized flowsheet leverages the pressure sensitivity of the azeotropes as well as the liquid–liquid phase split for efficient separation. To improve the energy efficiency, the basic flowsheet, consisting of a decanter, a high-pressure simple column, and a low-pressure divided-wall column, is heat-integrated (HI) using external heat exchangers to obtain the HI-CD process. The most energy-efficient hybrid-CD process is obtained by incorporating vapor recompression-driven reboil in the two columns along with external process-to-process heat exchange. A quantitative comparison with the recently reported best design, namely, the hybrid heterogeneous triple-column distillation (HTCD) process, reveals substantial economic and sustainability advantages of the proposed hybrid-CD process design. Specifically, the total annualized cost of the hybrid-CD process is lower by 15.4% compared with the hybrid-HTCD process. Energy consumption and CO₂ emission are also significantly lower by 34.3 and 31.4%, respectively.

中文翻译：

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用于 EtAc-MeOH-水分离的紧凑型共沸工艺的合成和集成设计


本研究介绍了一种双柱紧凑型蒸馏 （CD） 工艺的合成和设计，用于将稀乙酸乙酯 （EtAc）-甲醇 （MeOH）-水混合物（具有两个最低沸腾共沸物）分离成其组成（接近）纯组分。合成的流程图利用共沸物的压力敏感性以及液-液相分离来实现高效分离。为了提高能源效率，由卧螺离心机、高压简单塔和低压分壁塔组成的基本流程使用外部热交换器进行热集成 （HI） 以获得 HI-CD 工艺。最节能的混合 CD 工艺是通过在两个塔中加入蒸汽再压缩驱动的再沸以及外部工艺间热交换来实现的。与最近报道的最佳设计，即混合异质三柱蒸馏 （HTCD） 工艺的定量比较，揭示了拟议的混合 CD 工艺设计具有巨大的经济和可持续性优势。具体来说，与混合 HTCD 工艺相比，混合 CD 工艺的总年化成本降低了 15.4%。能源消耗和 CO₂ 排放量也分别显著降低了 34.3% 和 31.4%。