(195c) Capacity of High Performance Trays Limited By Column Inlet Arrangement and Vapor-Liquid Physical Separation Behavior in an Industrial Distillation Tower

Often in distillation towers, focus is geared toward the tray or packing hydraulics and majority of optimization efforts focuses on improving the tower performance by optimizing trays / packings hydraulics. More distillation towers are equipped with high capacity internals every day and as the feed rates and column throughputs are increased, and attention is forced more toward the contacting devices and away from other aspects, hence, some basic fundamentals are neglected. This paper will review a few of those fundamentals about gas-liquid physical separation in a distillation tower and how an improper feed inlet arrangement design, limits the column capacity equipped with high capacity trays and floods the trays. The paper will review the actual industrial tower troubleshooting and provides solution and guidelines to check and resolve the column's performance bottleneck.