Methoxy‐methylheptane as a cleaner fuel additive: An energy‐ and cost‐efficient enhancement for separation and purification units

Abstract

Abstract Environmental protection agencies have begun imposing stringent regulations on the existing refineries to control the levels of gasoline additives. In this context, a novel compound, 2‐methoxy‐2‐methylheptane (MMH), had drawn attention as fuel additive for cleaner combustion. The conventional process of MMH production features three distillation columns in a direct sequence. These columns are used to maintain the required product purities and to utilize the unreacted reactants through recycling streams. The distillation system of the existing MMH plant can afford significant energy savings, leading to a reduction in the total annual costs (TAC). The aim of this investigation is to demonstrate that the reported conventional process can be significantly enhanced by modifying the design and operational parameters and by replacing two distillation columns with an intensified dividing wall column (DWC) configuration. The DWC design is further optimized using several algorithms such as the modified coordinate method (MCD), robust particle swarm paradigm (PSP), and firefly (FF) with nonlinear constraints. Compared to conventional process, the optimized DWC resulted in 24% and 11.5% savings in the plant operating and total annual costs, respectively.

Keywords

• dividing wall column
• firefly optimization
• methoxy‐methylheptane process
• particle swarm paradigm
• total annual cost