Distillation Process Flowsheets & Simulations
Explore 13 validated, solved Distillation simulation flowsheets in MaximaLabs — real components: ethanol, water, n_butane, n_pentane, propane, acetone. Open any one directly in your browser.
Solved via: NRTL, PENG-ROBINSON, NRTL-ASSOCIATE.
Ethanol–water distillation
An 8-stage column concentrating ethanol overhead toward the azeotrope (the headline demo).
4 unit ops • NRTL
21 0
View & openPerry Ch.13 Example 3: butane/pentane splitter
A simple two-cut distillation splitting butane overhead from pentane bottoms, from Chapter 13 of Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook.
4 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
21 0
View & openPerry Ch.13 Example 4: sloppy-butane three-cut splitter
A three-cut column with a side draw producing a deliberately 'sloppy' (off-spec, cheaper-to-make) butane cut between a propane overhead and a pentane-plus bottoms, from Chapter 13 of Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook.
5 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
21 0
View & openAcetone–water distillation
A 12-stage column recovers acetone overhead from a dilute aqueous solvent-recovery feed — a common industrial acetone/solvent-recycling duty.
4 unit ops • NRTL
21 0
View & openAromatics column (Strigle)
A simple aromatics splitter recovering benzene overhead from a toluene/xylene-heavy feed, as described by R. Strigle (Gulf Publishing, 1987) — a classic packed-column textbook design case.
4 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
21 0
View & openDepropanizer (Strigle)
A depropanizer recovering propylene and propane overhead from a C4-and-heavier hydrocarbon feed, as described by R. Strigle (Gulf Publishing, 1987).
4 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
21 0
View & openIndustrial i-butane/n-butane splitter
A close-boiling isobutane/n-butane splitter as reported by Klemola and Ilme (Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 1996, 35, 4579) — the relative volatility between the two isomers is small (~1.3), so the column needs many stages and a high reflux ratio for a sharp split, unlike the wider-boiling LPG splits elsewhere in this library.
4 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
21 0
View & openVapor re-compression propane/propylene splitter
Propylene/propane splitters have a notoriously low relative volatility (~1.1-1.15), so they run at high reflux and benefit from heat pumping: the overhead vapor is compressed and used to reboil the same column at a lower operating pressure (here 12 bar vs. a conventional ~20 bar), cutting the compressor shell cost (Christopher et al., Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 56, 14557, 2017). The reboiler heat-integration loop itself is not modeled here (that would need a recycle-coupled duty match) — this shows the column plus the overhead compression/condensing train, a bounded simplification.
6 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
21 0
View & openLPG dividing-wall splitter
Propane / isobutane / n-butane separated in one thermally-coupled dividing-wall column (shortcut splits): three on-spec products from a single shell. From the ChemSep casebook (LPG_DWC, Gas Processing Dec 2018).
5 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
21 0
View & openReformate splitter
A single column cutting catalytic reformate into a light benzene/hexane overhead and a toluene/xylene bottoms — the IECR 50, 5680 configuration from the ChemSep casebook.
4 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
22 0
View & openBio-ethanol: energy-integrated distillation + MVR stillage concentration
A dilute beer (10% ethanol) is concentrated toward the azeotrope in a beer column, and the water-rich stillage bottoms are concentrated in an evaporator whose vapor is recompressed by a mechanical-vapor-recompression (MVR) compressor — recovering the stillage vapor's latent heat as high-grade heating duty instead of venting it, the energy-integration route that eliminates a separate thermal oxidizer. Honesty note: the MVR train is modeled at screening fidelity (an evaporator + a real isentropic-efficiency recompression of its vapor, reporting the recompression work); the solids in real stillage are not tracked (the bottoms is modeled as the ethanol/water liquid), and this is an equipment-train energy study, not a rigorous three-phase superheated-steam dryer.
9 unit ops • NRTL
23 0
View & openAcetic acid recovery — NRTL with vapor-phase dimerization
Concentrating dilute aqueous acetic acid (30 mol%) to a 99.8% acetic-acid bottoms product by distillation, modeled with the NRTL activity package and chemical-theory vapor-phase association (acetic acid dimerizes, 2 A -> A2, in the vapor). This is the physics a cubic equation of state gets wrong: the pinned NRTL acetic-acid/water binary (DECHEMA) plus the cited dimerization constants (Nagy et al., Molecules 2020) give the real bubble curve and latent heat, so the close-boiling acid/water pair actually separates and converges where Peng-Robinson does not. Honesty note: acetic acid and water are close-boiling with no azeotrope, so the water distillate is only ~87% water (the acid product is the concentrated, high-purity stream); a sharper water cut needs more stages / reflux than this screening case uses.
4 unit ops • NRTL-ASSOCIATE
22 0
View & openRate-based distillation (Maxwell-Stefan, ChemSep-style)
A depentanizer split (n-pentane overhead from an n-pentane/n-hexane/n-heptane feed) solved with a rigorous rate-based (nonequilibrium) stage model rather than the usual equilibrium-stage assumption. Every stage carries separate bulk vapor and liquid compositions with a vapor-liquid interface in equilibrium and finite Maxwell-Stefan mass-transfer fluxes across each film, and the per-stage transfer coefficients come from the real Chan-Fair (1984) tray-efficiency correlations off estimated tray geometry -- the exact physics ChemSep and Aspen RateSep are built on. The result: real trays lag equilibrium, so the finite-transfer distillate is measurably less pure (~98.7% C5) than an equilibrium-stage model predicts (~99.8%) on the identical column -- roughly 5x more hexane slips overhead. Open the equivalent equilibrium column ('ethanol-water-distillation' or any 'distillation' node) to see the gap the equilibrium-stage assumption hides. As the mass-transfer coefficients grow the model collapses back onto the equilibrium column (the built-in validation limit).
4 unit ops • PENG-ROBINSON
34 0
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