Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.58, No.28, 12687-12701, 2019
Managing Trace Components in a Dividing Wall Distillation Column: An Experimental Study
Industrial distillation columns must manage impurities inherently present in feed mixtures. Proving that dividing wall columns (DWCs) can deal with trace components is an important step toward their more widespread industrial acceptance. Yet, there is a dearth of literature dealing with DWC control in the presence of trace feed impurities. In this paper, conventional controller design tools are used to devise multiloop control structures that manage the concentration of a trace feed impurity in the product streams. The performance of the control structures is verified experimentally on a pilot-scale column built as part of a collaboration between industry and academia. Using two temperature controllers for composition control, it is shown that the impurity can be seamlessly shifted between product streams, and multiple feed disturbances are successfully rejected. In addition to extending the limited number of openly available experimental DWC studies, this work highlights the controllability and operational flexibility of dividing wall columns.