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Simulating A Closed Distillation System In Aspen


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#1 caconym

caconym

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Posted 22 February 2023 - 03:57 AM

Hello all, first post here

 

In a lab course my group ran a distillation column at total reflux to measure the steady state mole fractions of IPA and water at each of the 8 trays. 

 

I'm attempting to simulate this in Aspen Plus V12 for some extra credit, but I'm having trouble making it work as a closed system.

 

The setup has a tank with a boiler at the bottom, the column with trays directly above that, then an outlet to a condenser that routes back into the top tray to flow back down. There is other equipment to collect distillate and bottom flow, as well as a couple of tanks to feed into the system, but we shut all the valves to all of those so that the mixture would remain in the boiler, column, and condenser only as we were instructed. 

 

I've tried to set this up in Aspen in a few different ways, but it seems to really want some kind of feed in and out. I first tried a radfrac column, then found the BatchSep model which almost seemed to work until it simply bypassed it when I ran the sim. 

 

After that, I found the Batch tab at the top and switched it from continuous to batch, but I lost the convenient BatchSep model and I'm basically back at square one. 

 

We haven't really done anything in Aspen other than a quick tutorial in either fluids or thermal a couple years ago, so I'm very new to the program and have been stumbling my way around in it the last few days. Adjusting all the parameters has been straightforward enough, though.

 

My main question is, is this type of setup even possible in Aspen? It makes sense to me that in the real world you'd always want to collect some kind of distillate, so there's no reason for it to allow you to run it as a closed system in the first place. It does give an option for total reflux, but from what I've seen online that seems to be used only for a set amount of time.

 

Also, if there's a better software to simulate this I'm all ears. The requirement is just to simulate it using some kind of chemical engineering software.

 

 



#2 SilverShaded

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Posted 22 February 2023 - 04:19 AM

It can be done, use full reflux, recycle the bottom and top products back to the feed which you feed into the reboiler, set the vapour flow from the condenser to be a very small number.

The extra credits though should be for you figuring out a solution not asking in a forum.  Simply using a simualtor is not evidence of any understanding.






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