LAUSR

Abstract The intensified heat integrated technology can be applied to the distillation column to improve the utilization of energy resources in the chemical separation processes. For further improving the energy efficiency of the hydrocarbon mixture distillation separation process, a novel two-parts heat integrated dividing wall column (DWC) with middle vapor recompression (MVRC) is proposed in this paper. Differed by the position of vapor recompression, above or beneath the dividing wall in the column, two configurations of MVRC assisted DWC (MVRC-DWC) were developed and comprehensively evaluated by energy, exergy, economic and environmental impact (4E) analysis, with comparison to the existing vapor recompression assisted dividing wall column (VRC-DWC) and a very competitive improved heat integration of VRC-DWC (IHI-VRC-DWC). Moreover, the heat integration between the pre-separated column and different DWC configurations are carefully designed and also evaluated by 4E analysis. Comparatively, the CRS-MVRC-DWC can supply more latent heat of the vapor to the pre-separated column, consequently the process has the largest energy saving and lowest exergy consumption and exergy loss than the other configurations. The TAC saving of process with CRS-MVRC-DWC can reach to the highest value of 25.72%.