Sustainable design and multi-objective optimization of heat pump assisted extractive distillation process for separating a ternary mixture of methyl acetate, tetrahydrofuran and methanol

The separation of a ternary mixture of methyl acetate (MeAc), tetrahydrofuran (THF), and methanol (MeOH) produced from chemical or pharmaceutical plants can not only recover the valuable chemicals but also reduce the environmental pollution caused by the emission of waste organics. In this study, a two-step extractive distillation process with four columns (FCED) with dimethyl sulfoxide and p-xylene serving as the entrainers was firstly proposed to separate the ternary mixture by using Aspen Plus simulation. The vapor recompression heat pump (VRHP) technology was introduced to improve the thermodynamic efficiency of the proposed FCED process. Subsequently, a multi-objective optimization using the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II was employed to optimize the designed processes to accomplish a Pareto front trade-off in three crucial indicators, i.e., total annual cost (TAC), CO2 emission, and exergy efficiency. A Pareto ranking method, i.e., the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solutions combined with entropy weighting approach, was used to choose the best solution from the Pareto front. The results indicate that, compared to the FCED process, TAC (8-year payback period) and CO2 emissions of the VRHP-assisted FCED are reduced by 8.75% and 33.26%, respectively, while the exergy efficiency is increased by 8.06% from 3.67% to 3.96%, demonstrating that the introduction of VRHP can significantly improve the performance of the FCED process.