Journal of Cleaner Production 72 (2014) 222e229

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Journal of Cleaner Production

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jclepro

Design and simulation of ethane recovery process in an extractive

dividing wall column
Yadollah Tavan a, *, Shahrokh Shahhosseini b, Seyyed Hossein Hosseini c
a

National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC), Tehran, Iran

Process Simulation and Control Research Laboratory, School of Chemical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 16765-163,
Narmak, Tehran, Iran
c
Chemical Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Ilam University, 69315-516 Ilam, Iran
b

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Received 9 May 2013
Received in revised form
1 March 2014
Accepted 3 March 2014
Available online 14 March 2014

Separation of CO2 from hydrocarbons in the natural gas is complicated due to the existence of an
azeotrope between ethane and CO2 at the cryogenic temperatures. The key issues to break this azeotrope
are high investment costs for the unit equipments and the associated high energy requirements.
Accordingly, an innovative process based on the dividing-wall column (DWC) technology is designed
using short-cut methods and relevant rigorous simulations. The energy demand and some environmental factors such as CO2 removal efciency and CO2 emission reduction are studied for the conventional and DWC processes. It is found that the process including DWC is a better choice than the
conventional one from economical and environmental point of views. Remarkably, this technology reduces the energy demand up to 51.6%.
2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Dividing wall column
Distillation
Separation
Simulation
Azeotropic process
Design

1. Introduction
The increase in global energy demand has led to widespread
investigations on alternative sources of primary energy even at the
most remote areas of the earth. Natural gas is the most sought, after
liquid fuel source, due to its cleaner combustion and less ue gas
emission into the atmosphere (Alfadala and Al-Musleh, 2009).
Natural gas contains impurities such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen
sulde, carbon disulde, mercaptans and sometimes traces of
carbonyl sulde. The removal of acid gases, H2S and CO2 from gas
stream is essential due to environmental, operational and health
reasons (Maddox, 1982). Generally, the acid gas pipeline specications are 4.0 ppm H2S and 2 vol% of CO2 with the dew point of less
than 263 K at 4500 kPa. Since H2S is extremely corrosive and toxic,
it is removed from the gas before its consumption. Apart from
meeting customers contract specications and successful liquefaction process, removal of CO2 from natural gas at high pressure
has currently become a global issue (Tavan and Hosseini, 2013a).
Despite several researches done on CO2 capturing in chemical

* Corresponding author. Tel./fax: 98 21 88912525.

E-mail address: yadollahtavan@gmail.com (Y. Tavan).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2014.03.015
0959-6526/ 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

processes (Sun and Smith, 2013; Harkin et al., 2010; Cmara et al.,
2013), the existence of the minimum boiling CO2-ethane azeotrope in natural gas process could causes certain problems. High
concentrations of carbon dioxide in natural gas occur when carbon
dioxide is used for enhanced oil recovery. An azeotrope between
ethane (C2H6) and CO2 complicates separation of CO2 from natural
gas. Accordingly, using natural gas liquid (NGL) as extractive
component, Lastari et al. (2012) proposed low temperature distillation process in a series of distillation columns. The system generates high pressure CO2, pure ethane and some amounts of NGL.
However, the conventional extractive distillation process typically
includes two serial distillation columns. The main disadvantage of
this separation process is its high capital investment and high
amount of energy required to fulll the desired purication.
Therefore, to overcome this drawback, advanced intensication and
integration process techniques such as thermally coupled distillation columns, dividing-wall columns (DWC), heat-integrated
distillation columns and reactive distillation (RD) were employed
(Yildirim et al., 2011). In a DWC, the middle section of a single vessel
is split into two sections by inserting a vertical wall into an
appropriate position of the column (Bravo-Bravo et al., 2010;
Gutirrez-Guerra et al., 2009). The DWCs have attracted more
attention in the chemical industries recently due to separation of

Y. Tavan et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 72 (2014) 222e229

223

more components in one single distillation unit, thereby saving

both energy and capital costs. The theoretical studies have shown
that DWCs could lead to at least 30% reduction in energy costs
compared to conventional schemes (Sangal et al., 2012; GmezCastro et al., 2011). It is notable that DWC technology is not
limited to ternary separations; it can also be used in azeotropic
separations, extractive distillation, and reactive distillation (Kiss
and Suszwalak, 2012a).
Although several researches have conducted about extractive
dividing-wall columns (Ignat and Kiss, 2012; Sangal et al., 2014; Wu
et al., 2013), the process being studied is different from conventional extractive distillation columns. In conventional extractive
columns a third component is added to the system and solvent loss
in the product streams requires a make-up stream; while in the
present study, the solvent is a mixture of propane and heavier
components (NGL) in which the solvent stream is quite similar to
the light key (ethane). These distinct features of the process leads to
some convergence problems. Furthermore, the present study has
some advantages such as existence of no water in the solvent
stream and accordingly non-corrosive behavior of the solvent as
compared with conventional extractive processes. In addition, in
order to reduce the energy requirements and number of trays in the
extractive distillation process of separating the CO2/ethane azeotrope, possibility of using DWC is examined by HYSYS3.1 (www.
aspentech.com) for the rst time using top-wall conguration.
Furthermore, the rates of the interconnecting streams are optimized in order to minimize energy requirement of the process.
Eventually, energy requirements and some environmental parameters of the novel DWC (improved) process and the conventional
one are compared with each other to nd a more benecial process.
2. Simulation
2.1. Thermodynamic analysis of the extractive column
Several strategies have been used in industries in order to
separate the azeotropic mixtures. Some of them require addition of
a third chemical component for shifting the vaporeliquid equilibrium such as extractive distillation, which uses a higher boiling
solvent and azeotropic heterogeneous distillation for entraining
chemical component. Another method for breaking azeotropes,
which does not require addition of a third component, is pressure
swing azeotropic distillation, wherein two columns operate at two
different pressures (Doherty and Malone, 2001; Luyben, 2013). The
thermodynamic analysis should be done prior to choosing the best
method for separating the azeotropes. For this purpose, a system
containing CO2/ethane and n-pentane as an agent of extraction is
considered. CO2 and ethane are dissimilar molecules and have
different boiling points of 78 and 88  C and molecular weights
of 44 and 30 g/mol, respectively. These molecules have a strong
repulsion towards each other which leads to existence of a minimum boiling azeotrope in the system as shown in Fig. 1(a, b). From
the gure, the azeotrope compositions are 0.67 and 0.64 at 2400
and 1500 kPa, respectively. Therefore, the relative volatility of CO2ethane azeotrope does not signicantly change with pressure and
conrms that the pressure swing distillation is not appropriate for
the present study. Fig. 1b clearly indicates that the phase envelope
of the system drastically changes with n-pentane mole fraction.
Furthermore, addition of n-pentane decreases CO2 freezing temperature to 75.9  C (preventing formation of solid CO2). Therefore,
using extraction distillation is a promising process for the present
system. The residue curve of CO2/ethane/n-pentane can be helpful
in elucidating the distillation part. Accordingly, the residue curve
map of the mixture at the pressure of 2400 kPa is illustrated in
Fig. 2. As shown in Fig. 2, the ternary mixture presents a single

Fig. 1. The properties of CO2-ethane azeotrope process in terms of (a) binary diagram
and (b) phase envelope.

Fig. 2. The residue curve map of CO2, ethane and normal pentane.

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Y. Tavan et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 72 (2014) 222e229

Table 2
Comparison of energy demands for the conventional and DWC systems.
Equipment

Conventional

Property
Total trays
Condenser duty (kW)
Reboiler duty (kW)
Total duty (kW)

DWC

Column1

Column2

DWC

Main column

50
95,782
592,44
155,026

50
181,471
197,272
378,742

20
18,096
e
18,096

40
88,981
150,855
239,835

2.2. Simulation of extractive process

Fig. 3. The diagrams of (a) extractive distillation and (b) the dividing wall column
(improved) processes: (symbols used in Fig. 3b: RCY: Recycle operator; SET: Set
operator; E: Heat exchanger; TEE: Flow splitter; 1, 2, 3, 4, Vap and Liqq: Material
streams; Qa, Qcc, n and Qr: Energy streams).

binary azeotrope at 19.11  C with CO2 (mole fraction of 0.67) and

ethane without any liquid phase splitting. This gure also shows
the residue curve lines from the lowest azeotrope boiling point up
to the highest one (n-pentane). The results indicate that extractive
distillation can be used in presence of a miscible mixture and a
homogeneous azeotrope. Moreover, this azeotrope limits the
attainable separation in a single column and addition of the second
column is mandatory in order to cross the azeotrope.

Fig. 3a illustrates a direct sequence of extractive distillation

columns (conventional scheme) used for separation of CO2 from
ethane. The process contains two distillation columns, two condensers and two reboilers. In the rst column, a fraction of NGL
stream is served as high entrainer which preferentially carries
ethane to the next column. The CO2 and ethane streams (main
products) are drawn from the top of the columns with compositions of 95 and 99.9 mol %, respectively. The bottom stream of the
second column that contains higher hydrocarbons is divided into
two parts, one of which is pumped back into the rst column for
breaking the azeotrope. For simulation of the conventional process
illustrated in Fig. 3a, two Set blocks are added to the system in
order to control the solvent/feed ow ratio (S/F) and rate of recycling stream. The conventional process is simulated by HYSYS 3.1
with Peng-Robinson property model for the vaporeliquid equilibrium of the system (Torres-Ortega et al., 2013). The two serial columns containing 50 ideal trays operate at 2400 kPa with a 100 kPa
pressure drop. The number of stages, optimum inlet stages and feed
rates are extracted from the Lastari et al. (2012) study. The run
specications of CO2 purity and the temperature of the condenser
in the top stream of the rst column are 95% and 14  C, respectively. Furthermore, the condenser temperature of 5.5  C and
ethane purity more than 99% are used in the top stream of the
second column. The input data and simulation results are listed in
Tables 1 and 2.
The process under study is a challenging and complex simulation case and some considerations are essential during its design
and optimization. Fig. 4 shows the temperature and composition
proles of CO2/ethane/propane along with the rst and the second
distillation columns. This gure shows that the required specications are satised by the model. The concentrations of ethane and
CO2 increase oppositely along the rst column. In addition, the
concentration of CO2 is negligible in the second column and the
NGL stream contains lower amounts of CO2 and ethane.

Table 1
Input data and simulation results of the conventional and DWC systems.
Stream

Property
Flow rate (mol/s)
Pressure (kPa)
Temperature ( C)
Mol%
CO2
Ethane
Propane
i-C4
n-C4
i-C5
n-C5

Feed

3800
2415
30
32.25
46.23
7.53
7.47
3.29
2.09
1.1 4

Solvent

3024
2410
40
0
0.50
32.63
35.93
15.46
10.3
5.18

Conventional

DWC

CO2

Ethane

NGL

CO2

Ethane

NGL

Vap

Liqq

1288
2400
13.05

1720
2400
5.53

792.1
2600
96

1280
2400
13.38

1772
2400
5.99

760
2600
90.07

3033
2500
33.01

8545
2500
30.36

95.42
0.14
3.86
0.58
0
0
0

0.21
99.01
0.17
0
0
0
0

0
0
30.89
36.43
16.54
10.39
5.75

0
83.3
8.13
5.89
1.90
0.58
0.20

0
51.29
15.24
18.00
8.00
5.00
2.47

94.96
3.30
1.74
0
0
0
0

0.14
99.66
0.2 0
0
0
0
0

0
0.50
32.86
35.84
15.79
10.03
4.98

Y. Tavan et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 72 (2014) 222e229

225

of the base simulation and shortcut design are used as the initial
estimates for the feed tray locations and vapor splitting. In this
study, the design steps and implementation of the DWC are similar
to the conventional process. The detailed information about the
DWC simulation can be found elsewhere (Premkumar and
Rangaiah, 2009). The simulation results of the DWC unit are also
listed in Tables 1 and 2.
Fig. 6(a, b) shows the composition proles in both sides of the
wall. As can be seen in the gure, high purities of the valuable
products are obtained in the extractive DWC. Furthermore, there
are large amounts of CO2 and propane in the MC and the ethane
concentration increases gradually along the column. In the PF column, concentration of ethane increases, while CO2 concentration
decreases along the rst column and the same trend can be
observed in extractive sequence columns. A comparison between
the conventional scheme, which includes two sequence columns
and the proposed DWC, is made. It is found that energy saving of
13.7% is possible by using DWC unit. This value is roughly equivalent to the corresponding term obtained by Kiss and Suszwalak
(2012a) for bioethanol dehydration process. It should be noted
that 13.7% energy saving is considerably low due to the fact that the
optimized parameters of the conventional scheme proposed by
Lastari et al. (2012) was used in this study and the DWC system is
not in its optimized state, yet. Consequently, the DWC system is
optimized in the next section in order to make a fair comparison.
3.2. Optimization of extractive DWC unit

Fig. 4. The temperature and composition proles of CO2/ethane/propane along the (a)
rst and (b) second distillation columns.

Hereafter, it is assumed that energy optimization of a DWC with

xed number of trays is equivalent to energy minimization of the
whole DWC process since the energy consumption strongly depends on the interconnection between the liquid and vapor rates

3. Results and discussion

3.1. Simulation of extractive DWC unit
A ow diagram of extractive DWC that is consisted of two
condensers, a reboiler and a main column containing sieve trays, is
shown in Fig. 3b. Such conguration for a DWC has previously been
described by the researchers (Yildirim et al., 2011; Kiss and
Suszwalak, 2012a,b; Tavan and Hosseini, 2013b) and usually
called top-wall conguration. In the DWC system, the solvent is
separated as a single bottom product, while two other distillate
products (CO2 and ethane) are extracted from each side of the main
column. Since there is no off-the-shelf DWC unit in the current
commercial process simulators, two coupled columns are used in
HYSYS 3.1, as thermodynamically equivalent of the extractive DWC.
The liquid coming out of the bottom of the prefractionator (PF) is
fed into the main column (MC), while a vapor stream is withdrawn
from the MC and fed into the bottom of the PF (also known as the
vapor split). Two distinct routes are used for decomposing the DWC
system into shortcut columns as shown in Fig. 5(a, b). These gures
are self-explanatory and the results reveal that the stages number
of 20 and 40 are accounted for the PF and MC, respectively.
Therewith, tray rating feature of HYSYS is used to calculate pressure
drops in the columns. The Vap stream is drawn from the 20th
stage of the MC column and introduced to the bottom tray of the PF.
The bottom stream of the PF column is also sent to the 20th stage of
the MC. Since the PF section has a condenser, CO2 purity in the
distillate stream (95%) is used as input data. Moreover, the MC has 3
degrees of freedom, therefore, the condenser temperature of 6  C
and ethane purity in the distillate and bottom stream of 99.99 and
0.1%, respectively, are used as the input parameters for easier
convergence of the solution. It is worth mentioning that the results

Fig. 5. Decomposing of the dividing wall column system into shortcut columns based
on (a) removal of ethane and (b) removal of CO2: (symbols used in gures: QC1, QC2
and QC3: Energy streams for condensers; Qr1, Qr2 and Qr3: Energy streams for
reboilers; Up-MC, Down-MC and PF: Shortcut columns).

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Y. Tavan et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 72 (2014) 222e229

Fig. 6. The results of the preliminary design of dividing wall column system in terms of
(a) composition proles of CO2/ethane/propane along the PF and (b) the MC.

(Delgado-Delgado et al., 2012). Hence, optimization of the interconnecting streams leads to an optimal design. In the present study,
the effect of the interconnecting stream rates, Vap and Solvent
streams, on the energy demands are investigated by xing the
number of ideal stages for the DWC unit. Since the solvent and
Vap streams have signicant effects on the composition proles
and duties in the extractive DWC, sensitivity analysis must be carried out rst in order to determine initial values for the solvent
and Vap streams (Xia et al., 2012). The results of sensitivity
analysis are used for optimization by HYSYS process software afterwards. Furthermore, it is tried to keep the nal product streams
at the industrial condition (CO2 > 95 mol % and ethane >99 mol % in
the top streams).
Fig. 7a shows the inuence of interconnecting stream (Vap
ow rate) on the total energy requirement that is summation of all
duties of the reboiler and condensers, for the DWC unit. This gure
shows that ow rate of Vap stream has a critical impact on the
process duty; consequently, Vap stream is an important parameter in DWC design that should be optimized. As can be seen in
Fig. 7a, increasing Vap ow rate leads to a subtle decrease in total
duty till the ow rate reaches up to 4000 mol/s, which attributes to
reduction in the condenser duty of the PF. By increasing the ow
rate of Vap stream above the minimum point (4000 mol/s), energy consumption increases signicantly due to the increase in
reux ratio of the MC in order to attain the desired purication of
ethane in the product stream, as shown in Fig. 7b. Fig. 7b also shows
that by increasing the Vap rate, the mole fraction of CO2 in the top
product of PF column decreases from 0.97 to 0.84. This conrms
that major part of the CO2 content appears in the MC. Therefore, the
optimum ow rate of Vap stream needed to attain a desired CO2
purity in the system is 3000 mol/s; hence the total energy demand
is minimized.
Fig. 8 shows the inuence of the solvent ow rate on total energy requirement of the DWC unit by xing stage numbers of the

columns and Vap ow rate (3000 mol/s). It is found that the

solvent ow rate is a crucial design parameter that should also be
optimized. From Fig. 8a, when the solvent rate is increased from
300 up to 6000 mol/s, duties of the units increase due to
enhancement of the columns stream rates. When the solvent rate is
increased, concentrations of CO2 and ethane in the product streams
rise exponentially in the system and consequently, required reux
ratio decreases as depicted in Fig. 8b. As a result, addition of solvent
to the system exhibits an advantage (reduction in reux ratio) and a
disadvantage (increase in duties) simultaneously. Therefore, the
solvent amount should be determined optimally not only to
decrease both duty and reux ratio, but also to achieve the industrial specication of the product streams. In the solvent rate of
3000e3300 mol/s, all desired specication of the product streams
(CO2 > 95 mol % and ethane> 99 mol % in the top streams) are
satised and with further increase in the solvent rate, more energy
is required due to increase of the column rates. Accordingly, the
optimum rate of the solvent stream is found to be 3024 mol/s.
Another simulation was carried out using optimal values of
interconnecting streams (solvent rate of 3024 mol/s and Vap ow
rate of 3000 mol/s) and the energy results are listed in Table 2. It
should be note that in order to minimize energy requirements in
the whole DWC unit, the sequential quadratic programming (SQP)
method implemented in HYSYS is also used to conrm the optimized results tabulated in Table 2. The target is minimization of
energy demand using the interconnecting ows as search variables
while assuming the pure CO2 and ethane at the top of the columns
as a constraint. During performance tests of this method, the
number of trays remained constant. The optimal result of SQP
method clearly conrms earlier ndings presented in Table 2.
Moreover, the mole balance of the components in the systems is
presented in Table 3. It can be inferred from Table 2 that 51.6%

Fig. 7. Finding the optimal rate of Vap stream using (a) energy demand and (b)
product specication.

Y. Tavan et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 72 (2014) 222e229

227

Fig. 9. Temperature prole of the dividing wall column system.

3.3. Comparison between alternatives

In order to make further comparison between the conventional
and DWC processes, in addition to energy demand, environmental
factors such as efciency of CO2 removal and CO2 emission reduction are investigated in the present research. Subsequently, results
of energy demand and environmental impacts analyses are
compared with each other.
Fig. 8. Finding the optimal rate of Solvent stream using (a) energy demand and (b)
product specication.

reduction in energy demand is possible for the optimal design of

the extractive DWC conguration compared with the optimal
design of conventional extractive distillation columns. This is in a
fair agreement with the ndings of other researchers of DWC
schemes (Yildirim et al., 2011; Delgado-Delgado et al., 2012; Premkumar and Rangaiah, 2009).
It is worth mentioning that the Petlyuk column is generally
more efcient than other thermally coupled schemes and a DWC is
practically identical to a Petlyuk column if the heat transfer across
the column wall is neglected or the wall is insulated. Accordingly,
Fig. 9 that shows the temperature difference between both sides of
the wall is prepared. As can be seen in this gure, the difference is
less than 20  C. Therefore, it can be assumed that there is no heat
transfer between two sides of the wall and the modeled system is
thermodynamically equivalent to the Petlyuk column. Moreover,
Fig. 10 shows the composition proles in both sides of the wall. The
gure shows that products with high purity are obtainable in the
DWC conguration. As a main result, using a DWC is an interesting
and suitable choice in extractive CO2-ethane process for the goal of
reducing operating and investment costs.

Table 3
Mole balance of the components in the proposed systems.
Component

CO2

Property
Conventional process
Input (mol/s)
1225.50
Output (mol/s)
1225.49
DWC process
Input (mol/s)
1225.50
Output (mol/s)
1225.17

3.3.1. CO2 removal efciency

Removal efciency (h) is dened as percentage of CO2 in the gas
stream that is removed during absorption operation. It should be
noted that removal efciency implies absorption performance of
the system (Tavan et al., 2014). The removal efciency for CO2 is
simply determined from the difference between the amounts of
CO2 entering the column and the corresponding term leaving each
stage of the column, which can be expressed by the following
equation:

"

!#

1  YCO2 ;in
YCO2 ; nth
1
YCO2 ;in
1  YCO2 ; nth


(1)

where yCO2 ;in and yCO2 ;nth stand for mole fractions of gas-phase CO2
entering to the column and leaving from each tray, respectively.
Fig. 11a displays CO2 removal performance for the introduced systems. In addition, Fig. 11b also shows distribution of overall removal
efciency of the processes. It is clearly shown in Fig. 11a that
removal efciency of the conventional process is quite higher than
the DWC in the middle trays of the absorption column. For the DWC
process, higher removal efciencies are observed in the lower
section of the absorption column. Additionally, equal removal efciencies are observed in the upper section of the absorption column, which indicates the same performances of the processes.
3.3.2. Estimation of CO2 emission reduction
During fuel combustion, air is assumed to be in excess to ensure
complete combustion, so that no carbon monoxide is formed. The
amount of emitted CO2, [CO2] Emiss (kg/s), is related to the energy
equivalent of the fuel, Q Fuel (kW), in the heating device, as follows
(Gadalla et al., 2005; Tavan et al., 2014):

Ethane

Propane

i-C4

n-C4

1756.74
1756.66

286.14
286.14

283.86
283.89

125.02
125.07

CO2 Emiss

1756.74
1756.25

286.14
286.04

283.86
284.29

125.02
125.07

where a (3.67) is the ratio of the molar masses of CO2 and C, while
NHV, which is equal to 39,771 (kJ/kg), stands for net heating value

QFuel
NHV


C%
a
100



(2)

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Y. Tavan et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 72 (2014) 222e229

these ndings and data about CO2 emission reduction and removal
efciencies, it is concluded that the novel DWC process can be
considered as a serious alternative candidate for the CO2-ethane
azeotropic process.

4. Conclusion
In the current research, the use of DWC for extractive CO2ethane azeotropic process is demonstrated through rigorous simulations. It is found that the rates of interconnecting streams have a
signicant impact on total energy demand and column specications. Therefore, in order to make a fair comparison with the conventional sequence distillation columns, the optimal values of
interconnecting rates are determined based on sensitivity analysis
and the SQP method. The simulation results indicated that by
raising the Vap rate, the mole fraction of CO2 in the top product of
DWC column decreases from 0.97 to 0.84 and a high amount of CO2
appears in the main column. In addition, escalation of Vap ow
rate leads to enhancement in energy consumption rate due to
higher reux ratio. Accordingly, the simulation results show that
the optimum rate of Vap stream is 3000 mol/s. The addition of the
solvent to the system exhibits an advantage (reduction of reux
ratio) and a disadvantage (increase in duties) at the same time.
Therefore, the solvent amount is determined not only to decrease
both duty and reux ratio, but also to achieve the industrial specications of the product streams. The results indicate that optimal
value of the solvent rate is 3024 mol/s. The results clearly show that
DWC process is feasible and the novel proposed DWC reduces energy demand by 51.6% and carbon footprint by 41%. In addition, the
novel proposed DWC needs low number of trays compared with
Fig. 10. Optimal results of the improved system in terms of (a) temperature prole and
(b) composition proles.

of heavy oil fuel with a carbon content of 86.5%.The ame temperature of a boiler is lower than the ame temperature of a
furnace, because combustion heat is removed immediately to the
steam. However, the same theoretical ame temperature of 1800  C
may still be used. A stack temperature of 160  C is also used in the
calculations. The energy equivalent of fuel can be calculated as
follows.

QFuel

QProc

lProc

hProc  419

TFTB  TO
TFTB  Tstack

(3)

where lProc (kJ/kg) and hProc (kJ/kg) are the specic latent heat and
specic enthalpy of steam delivered to the process, respectively,
and TTFB ( C) is the ame temperature of the boiler ue gases. The
above equation is obtained from the simple steam balance around
the boiler required to relate the energy equivalent of fuel in the
boiler to provide a heat duty of QProc. The boiler feed water is
assumed to be at 100  C with a specic enthalpy of 419 kJ/kg. From
Fig. 11b, it is evident that when the base case (conventional process)
emits one unit of CO2 (kg/s) to the environment, the improved
process (DWC) emits much lower CO2, by 0.59. Therefore, it can be
seen that 41% reduction in carbon emission is possible with the new
process and it comes as no surprise that the DWC alternative is in
the pole position with the lower carbon footprint.
3.4. Final comparison
By comparing energy demand of the conventional and DWC
processes, it is evident that the DWC process reduces energy demand by 51.6%. In addition, the novel proposed DWC needs low
number of trays compared to the conventional process. Based on

Fig. 11. Comparison between the proposed processes in terms of (a) CO2 removal efciency and (b) environmental effects.

Y. Tavan et al. / Journal of Cleaner Production 72 (2014) 222e229

conventional process. Therefore, the use of DWC for extractive CO2ethane azeotropic process is an interesting and suitable choice.
Acknowledgment
Useful comments from anonymous reviewers and the subject
editor are acknowledged which led to improvements in the original
version of the paper.
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