An innovative self-heat recuperation technology has been developed for heating and cooling thermal processes, in which not only latent heat but also sensible heat are circulated in a feed-effluent heat exchanger of the thermal process by compressing the effluent stream without any heat addition. Applying this technology to the thermal processes, the amount of energy required was determined using a commercial process simulation tool, PROII. The proposed self-heat recuperation technology, in which the heat of an effluent stream is recuperated and reused for feed stream heating by gas and/or vapor recompression, was found to drastically reduce the energy consumption.

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In this paper, an innovative design methodology is proposed for production by azeotropic distillation using self-heat recuperation technology to reduce energy consumption. Based on this design methodology, the heat of the distillate and condenser in each distillation column is recovered by compressors and exchanged with the heat of the corresponding feed and reboiler. Hence, a larger amount of heat, which consists of the sensible heat and latent heat of the process streams, is circulated within the process than that in a conventional azeotropic distillation process by the heat exchanger, leading to a significant reduction in the process energy required. Process simulation results for bioethanol production show that the azeotropic distillation process resulting from the proposed design methodology achieves a large reduction in energy compared to a conventional azeotropic distillation process.

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