CONTROL PROPERTIES ANALYSIS OF ALTERNATE SCHEMES TO THERMALLY COUPLED DISTILLATION SCHEMES

Recently, on the assumption that the presence of the recycle stream in thermally coupled distillation schemes (TCDS) might origin a difficult operation, some alternate arrangements that might provide better operational properties have been proposed. In this work, on the framework of singular value analysis, control properties of two alternate schemes were assessed and compared with their corresponding TCDS. The results show that the alternate schemes, in which the recycle streams are removed, do not necessarily provide an improvement on the control properties.