The separation of azeotropic mixtures is frequently performed by extractive or heteroazeotropic distillation processes. The design of these processes requires careful selection of a suitable solvent and is specifically challenging since feasibility and optimality of the processes require consideration of the closed loop design including solvent recovery. Consideration of energy integration further complicates the design task and is usually conducted as post-evaluation step. The current publication proposes an efficient optimization-based design approach, which allows for the direct evaluation of several energy-integrated process concepts, while significantly reducing manual effort and computational time through a polylithic modeling and solution approach. The developed approach allows for a simultaneous evaluation of solvent selection and energy integration and is illustrated for different case studies, including the evaluation extractive and heteroazeotropic distillation for the dehydration of ethanol, as well as the evaluation of multiple solvent candidates for the extractive distillation of acetone and methanol.

共沸混合物的分离通常通过萃取或多共沸蒸馏方法进行。这些方法的设计需要仔细选择合适的溶剂，并且特别具有挑战性，因为方法的可行性和最佳性需要考虑包括溶剂回收在内的闭环设计。能量集成的考虑进一步使设计任务复杂化，通常在评估后步骤中进行。当前出版物提出了一种有效的基于优化的设计方法，该方法可以直接评估多个能量集成的过程概念，同时通过多模型建模和解决方案方法显着减少人工和计算时间。