The trend of increasing product diversity and decreasing production amounts led to the requirement of higher flexibility of production processes of specialty chemicals. Conventional distillation columns, mostly equipped with structured packings, lack the flexibility to handle product changeovers and throughput. Thus, a newly designed distillation column for specialty chemicals is presented. A numerical model was implemented to analyze the potential of the wetted-wall column. The simulation of the distillation of a binary methanol/water mixture demonstrated that the wetted-wall column can generate the desired concentration and temperature profiles. Furthermore, analyses of the pressure drop and separation efficiency with the test system chlorobenzene/ethylbenzene were conducted.

中文翻译：

---

用于蒸馏特殊化学品的柔性湿壁塔的概念

产品多样性增加和产量减少的趋势导致对特种化学品生产过程灵活性的要求更高。传统的蒸馏塔大多配备规整填料，缺乏处理产品转换和吞吐量的灵活性。因此，提出了一种新设计的特种化学品蒸馏塔。实施了数值模型来分析湿壁柱的潜力。对二元甲醇/水混合物蒸馏的模拟表明，湿壁塔可以产生所需的浓度和温度曲线。此外，还对氯苯/乙苯测试系统的压降和分离效率进行了分析。