Design of distillation column for handling high density fermented wash in biorefinaries

Design of distillation column is a crucial task and becomes even more difficult when deals with high density foaming liquids like fermented wash. Fermented wash is a high density liquid (alcohol-water mixture) produced as a product of fermentation of molasses by yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Almost 99 % of biorefinaries employ distillation for recovery and concentration of ethanol from fermented wash. Since distillation is the highly energy intensive operation, it consumes almost 60 % of the total energy consumption of any distillery. Therefore optimization of distillation, to reduce the energy consumption is necessary. In view of this, the major areas where there is a possibility of energy optimization are identified. Wash handling column is one of such highly energy intensive area. Also there are operational difficulties like foaming and chocking of the trays due to higher density of fermented wash. The paper in details covers the modeling and development of excel program for design of distillation column. The papers also explain the newly designed parameters for design of distillation column to make it compatible for operating in multi-pressure distillation.