(80d) Innovations in Pilot Plant Process Distillation Design

MATRIC is a provider of expertise in chemical process development, in process conceptualization, simulation, experimental design and operation. We encounter a wide variety of technologies and problems, depending on our client's needs.

Distillation is a critical element of many chemical processes, and there are numerous problems that require innovative designs. This talk will cover many of the problems we encounter in the course of our work, with the focus being on small scale distillation. Examples of issues that we have encountered are:

• Heat loss in high temperature, small diameter columns
• High vacuum operation
• Compounds with freezing points above ambient
• Accurate measurement of low flow rates
• Cost effective development of model for reactive distillation
• Process sampling
• Development of integrated unit operations
• Product decomposition

We will provide examples of how we tackled these problems. The goal is to provide an approach to how these problems were solved which will have general applicability during the normal work of development.