Controllability analysis of alternate schemes to complex column arrangements with thermal coupling for the separation of ternary mixtures

Thermally coupled distillation systems (TCDS) have been proposed to perform distillation separation tasks with the incentive of achieving lower energy consumption levels with respect to conventional distillation sequences. In particular, the presence of recycle streams for TCDS schemes has influenced the notion that control problems might be expected during the operation of those systems with respect to the rather well-known behavior of conventional distillation sequences. That has been one of the main reasons for the lack of industrial implementation of thermally coupled distillation schemes. Recently, some alternatives to thermally coupled distillation arrangements that might provide better operational properties than the complex columns have been proposed. In this work, we analyze the control properties of two alternatives to the coupled systems. The results indicate that a reduction in the number of interconnections in alternate configurations does not necessarily provide an improvement of controllability properties. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.