(215d) Heat Integration in Thermal Separation Processes - State of the Art and New Ideas

In chemical processes the costs for energy actually are already a significant part of the total pro-duction costs. In future the impact of energy costs will even increase due to increasing energy prices. Furthermore it is a general necessity to reduce CO2 emission coupled with energy con-sumption. Therefore improvements of the energy efficiencies of the processes are effective means for the sustainability and the competitiveness of the resulting products. A relevant fraction of the energy consumption in chemical processes has to be allocated to thermal separation processes. So it is worthwhile to deal with heat integration measures within that area. Energy is introduced to and removed from processes in a wide variety of temperature levels and sizes. Of course all those heat streams have to be considered for energy reduction measures and the systematic approaches like ?Pinch Technology? teach that it has to be done very carefully. But a view on realized cases shows, that the most promising streams to deal with are over-head vapor streams from distillation columns or evaporators as a heat source for energy con-suming process steps. Those configurations are demonstrated in that presentation by using real-ized arrangements. Design challenges and Pitfalls are discussed. New ideas with their different grade of maturity will be shown and discussed.