Cyclic distillation - Design, control and applications

This paper fills this gap by presenting a novel rigorous model, an intuitive graphical representation and an insightful comparison against conventional distillation. The design problem is formulated as a set of delay-differential equations with events and discontinuities. Several case studies involving ideal and non-ideal mixtures (e.g. benzene/toluene/o-xylene, methanol/water and ethanol/n-propanol separations) illustrate the process design and demonstrate the high flexibility and good controllability of cyclic distillation.