Continuous Distillation

Continuous distillation is a kind of distillation and an ongoing process where a liquid blend of two or more miscible elements is kept on fed into the process and physically divided into two or more products by preferentially boiling the move volatile elements out of the blend. In recent days, continuous distillation is widely used in the chemical process industries. This is due to the requirements of several uses and factors which include large quantities of liquids that are to be distilled and such as the fact in petroleum refining, natural gas processing, petrochemical production, hydrocarbon solvents production, coal, tar processing and similar low-temperature processing.

Distillation in huge, vertical cylindrical columns

In industries distillation is specifically carried out in huge, vertical cylindrical columns usually known as distillation columns, distillation towers or sometimes as fractionators with diameters ranging from about 65 cm to 11 meters high and elevation form 6m to 60m or perhaps more. There are a series of horizontal distillation trays that offer for the close blend of the upward flowing vapor and downward flowing liquid in distillation columns.  These continuous distillation trays or plates are particularly divided by about 45 to 75cm of vertical space. Nevertheless, some columns are created to use beds of packing media rather than trays or plates.

As a primary unit operation in chemical engineering

Distillation is one among the primary unit operations of chemical engineering. For example, if the feed contains more than two elements, it is usually known as multi-component distillation and, if it includes only two elements, it is known as binary distillation. If the distillation column feed includes a many elements, division into pure elements is not viable. Therefore such columns are created to yield fractions which are groups of elements inside a wanted range of boiling points.

Apart from continuous distillation, there are a number of other kinds of distillations like vacuum distillation, batch distillation, steam distillation, extractive distillation and azeotropic distillation comprise of wide range of benefits.

Continuous distillation in the past

Distillation has been in practice for more than thousands of years but mostly the term pertained to the concentration of the alcoholic content of beverages. However, continuous distillation column was found to be used in alcohol distilleries which referred to be as patent still was developed in the year 1813 by Jean- Baptiste Cellier Blumenthal. It was only during the first half of the 20^th century, the use of continuous distillation extended from alcohol distilleries to become an essential separation in the chemical industry. After recognizing the effective results the use of continuous distillation was further sped up.

Questions:

• What is continuous distillation?
• List some of the benefits of continuous distillation.