ON STREAM SPLITTING IN SEPARATION SYSTEM SEQUENCING

For a separation system producing multicomponent products, stream spli tting besides stream bypassing has long been recognized as a technique that always reduces total mass load (TML) and should always be prefer red over sequential processing. Nevertheless, our preliminary analysis has indicated that stream splitting can increase TML under certain ci rcumstances which, in turn, may increase the cost of the system; furth ermore, even when stream splitting reduces TML, it may increase the ma ss load of one or more difficult separations and increase the cost of the system. An exhaustive parametric study of a class of relatively si mple problems is performed in this work to reveal the impact of stream splitting on the sequencing of separation systems. Some significant o bservations have been made, and some guidelines have been established for evolutionarily improving separation system sequencing involving st ream splitting.