Process boundary approach to separations synthesis

A method for synthesizing separation processes for multicomponent mixtures is presented which identifies the regions, boundaries, and the lower dimensional varieties in an N‐dimensional space. Both thermodynamic and equipment boundaries, which may block or limit a proposed separation step, are considered. To facilitate process synthesis, process boundaries are approximated as linear hyperplanes if appropriate, while nonlinear boundaries are represented using a set of linear hyperplanes. In conjunction with the available separation task selection methods, a step‐by‐step procedure is proposed to generate complete flowsheet alternatives, which allow bypassing both thermodynamic and equipment boundaries to achieve a given separations objective. Several example problems are solved using a spreadsheet program to illustrate the simplicity and applicability of this approach.