An MILP formulation for heat‐integrated distillation sequence synthesis

In this paper the problem of distillation sequence synthesis with heat integration is formulated and solved as a mixed integer linear superstructure optimization problem. Allowing both conventional and multieffect distillation, two alternatives for generating a superstructure are shown, then a formulation is presented which approximates the synthesis problem as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem. Examples illustrate the method. Reported computer times suggest that earlier algorithmic methods for discovering the better sequences among those allowed by the problem formulation, and without the option of multieffecting, are an order of magnitude slower than this approach.