Abstract

In early project stages often no simulation results are available for dividing wall columns. Hence, shortcut methods are helpful providing estimates for vapor and liquid splits which can be used for initializing rigorous process models. In a previous paper it was shown that diagrams are a suited tool to satisfy this need. However, it has turned out that the approach shows weaknesses for columns with finite and non-optimally allocated stage numbers. This contribution closes this gap and presents a new approach to derive suited initial guesses. For this purpose, the original diagram is combined with a heuristic approach to calculate Pareto-optimal column designs. The resulting stage-adapted diagram can then be used to graphically determine suited ranges of the vapor and liquid splits. A comparative study shows that the new approach is a powerful tool to enable reliable guesses for multiple dividing wall column simulations with finite stage numbers.