Methodology and applications of robust optimization

Automatic Design of Extractive Distillation Sequence for a Multicomponent Azeotropic System

“…The distillation regions composed of this component can be obtained by the algorithm in Section 2. The singularity number in Table 1 is used to represent the distillation regions as [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] and [1,2,5,6,8].…”

“…Then, the topology analysis for this example is carried out, and the singularity number in Table 7 is used to represent the distillation regions as [1,2,4,6,7,9] and [1,2,4,6,7,10]. Through the divided distillation regions' structure, it can be clearly found that the component space of the system is exactly divided into two parts by the distillation boundary [1,2,4,6,7], and according to the algorithm in Section 2, both distillation regions contain only one distillation compartment.…”

“…Thermal integration of the distillation sequence was considered simultaneously in their algorithm, and the results showed that the proposed method could significantly reduce the total annual cost (TAC). For the optimization of distillation sequences, deterministic algorithms and random optimization algorithms can be taken into account, such as global optimization algorithm, robust optimization algorithm, and genetic algorithm . It is very often that there are azeotropes in the distillation process, which increases the difficulty of the distillation sequence design; for such a distillation sequence design, empirical rules are usually adopted, which may not get the most optimal distillation sequence.…”