GRAPHICAL EXERGY ANALYSIS METHOD FOR OPTIMUM DESIGN AND OPERATIONS OF SEPARATION PROCESSES

Enhancing the performance of energy savings is imperative to solve the issues of
natural resources depletion and energy demand increase. Improvement of energy
efficiency in chemical process industry leads to reduction of operations cost and
environmental emission. In chemical plants, distillation and absorption are important
separation processes that are widely used for product recovery and purification. These
processes are energy intensive. Currently, exergy concept has gained renewed interest
to analyse the performance of energy intensive processes. In this work, a general
framework is proposed to establish the correlations between design and operations
parameters to exergy lost of separation processes. A new graphical method, three
dimensional exergy analysis diagram, is constructed from the general framework for
optimisation of distillation and absorption columns. The diagram provides
visualisation of the full energy savings potential and the path to achieve the optimum
state of design and operations.