Fast Startup Dynamics of Diabatic Distillation with Electric Heating

The electrification of process heating presents an opportunity to decarbonize distillation column operations and enhance operational strategies to save energy. Conventional column configurations are adiabatic and have low thermodynamic efficiencies due to heat degradation. Further, the startup process for conventional columns is slow and has significant energy requirements for re-establishing steady state hydraulic, composition, and flow profiles. In this paper, a speculative fully diabatic distillation column configuration with modular electric stage heating is introduced. A dynamic simulation model is built from first principles using a compartmentalization approach for equilibrium stages, as well as a hierarchical modeling framework for column control and auxiliary heating. We demonstrate that this structure has exceptionally small startup times compared to conventional columns through a simulation case study considering the binary separation of an equimolar mixture of acetic acid/propanol, as well as illustrate its significant energy savings over the startup period, which can translate into grid-integrated operating strategies for electrified distillation systems.