2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The typical capstone design project in chemical engineering involves designing a process to manufacture a commodity chemical. During this exercise students often find themselves in a position to use distillation columns for purifying ternary mixtures. They use a commercial process design software called Aspen Plus to complete the design. Aspen is a black box and students often are left wondering why some parameter choices resulted in a functioning column while others did not. We have built a Python based demonstration that will help students understand the fundamentals of ternary mixture phase behavior and the steps that happen under the hood in Aspen Plus while designing distillation columns for separating ternary mixtures. Our Python codebase which will be made available via PyPI can be used to design distillation columns for a mixture of any number of components. We have created Jupyter notebooks that uses this codebase to help students understand under what conditions a column for ternary mixture separation becomes feasible. We also have notebooks that describe how extractive distillation using a double feed column can be used to separate azeotropes.

I would like my paper to be consider for a regular session presentation.