Integrated Retification Systems

Most liquid product mixtures as we can find them in refineries or petrochemical processes need to be separated to fractions of well defined boiling point ranges or individual components with high purity specifications.

Rectification is the operation of choice in order to achieve this goal. If we are talking about multicomponent mixtures typically more than one column is required for the task.

The downside of rectification as a thermal separation process in general is the high energy demand. While bottoms product needs to be boiled up for e.g. by means of steam or thermal oil, the top products need to be condensed by heat transfer to the air or cooling water. Thus large amounts of energy are finally dissipated this way.

ENCOS strong process solutions for severe energy savings in this field are:
 

• Deviding Wall Columns which essentially integrate two columns in one
   
• Rectification Sequences with Reboiler/Condenser heat integration
   

Dividing Wall Columns represent fully thermally coupled distillation columns that require much less energy, capital and space compared to conventional systems.

ENCOS provides outstanding experience in the design of DWCs.

From rigorous simulation through column & internals dimensioning to detailed engineering and startup ENCOS successfully realized several DWCs in the field of petrochemical productions.

Besides Dividing Wall Columns ENCOS has the capabilities to design the most optimized Rectification Sequences applying highly specialized simulation software to identify the most energy efficient column sequence constellation with maximum achievable heat integration for a given multicomponent separation task.

Industrial applications of this type have been realized by ENCOS for e.g. in the field of multi solvent recovery and separation.