1. Introduction

Excerpt

Without distillation, there would be no modern living (Rosenzeig, 1997) because it is the most well-defined separation process that is used widely to produce the world’s petroleum fuels, to treat most natural gas, and is a critical element in a host of processes making the chemicals and other products that world needs (Sorensen and Darton, 2006). The performance of these industries is strongly dependent on the engineering and engineers. One typical drawback of distillation processes is that they require the largest portion of energy in industrial separation technologies with an estimated 3% of the world’s energy consumption (Hewitt et al., 1999). This can significantly influence the overall plant profitability. Therefore, development of a new type of column and/or performance enhancement of existing distillation processes for improved energy efficiency have been imperative issues associated with distillation (Olujic et al., 2009). In addition, saving energy in this process is also an important issue from an environmental standpoint or carbon dioxide (CO₂) mitigation because the huge amount of energy consumed in distillation has a large impact on greenhouse gas emissions (Matsuda et al., 2012). …