Bio-ethanol Dehydration in a Heat Pump Aided Extractive Dividing-wall Column

Large-scale production of bio-ethanol fuel requires energy demanding separation steps to concentrate the diluted streams from the fermentation step and to overcome the azeotropic behavior of the ethanol–water mixture. In the present work, a novel heat pump aided extractive dividing-wall column (H-E-DWC) is designed to substitute the conventional separation approach which consists of three distillation columns performing several tasks with high energy penalties