We present an easy-to-use step-wise procedure to synthesize an initial-dividing wall column (i-DWC) from any given n-component basic distillation column sequence or its thermally coupled derivative. The procedure to be used is dependent on the nature of the distillation column sequence that is to be converted into a DWC, and comprises of an intuitive set of steps that we demonstrate through examples. It is noteworthy that, even for a ternary distillation, 15 potentially useful DWCs, some of which had been missing from the literature, have now been identified. This work significantly expands the search space of useful DWCs to separate any given multicomponent mixture. © 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2017

中文翻译：

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一种合成所有分隔壁塔以进行n组分分离的系统方法-第一部分

我们提出了一种易于使用的分步程序，可以从任何给定的n组分基本蒸馏塔序列或其热耦合衍生物合成初始分隔壁塔（i-DWC）。所使用的程序取决于将要转换为DWC的蒸馏塔顺序的性质，并且包括我们通过示例演示的一组直观步骤。值得注意的是，即使对于三元蒸馏，现在也已经鉴定出15种潜在有用的DWC，其中一些在文献中被遗漏了。这项工作大大扩展了有用DWC的搜索空间，以分离任何给定的多组分混合物。©2017美国化学工程师学会AIChE J，2017