Resumen
Distillation is a widely-used method by industry for separating mixtures of liquids. Distillation is responsible for a significant amount of energy consumption of the world?s process industry. Concerns over recent high energy consumption and economic pressures continually emphasize the need for efficient distillation design and operation without a loss of performance. Besides, continuous increasing of energy price also limits the industry competitiveness and it is ever becoming a critical issue in fulfilling sustainable development. V-min diagram is one of the method to design an effective distillation column which can minimize the used of energy in the distillation process. Therefore, this research is to develop a tool for V-min diagram calculation for multicomponent distillation column. Visual Basic Application Editor (VBA) was being used to develop the tools. This tool will allow a user to insert production information on distillation process and it will straight away give a V-min diagram as a result. There were 2 examples taken from Minimum Energy Consumption in Multicomponent Distillation, to validate the functionality of the tool developed (V-min calculator). Separation mixture of n-heptane, n-hexane and n-heptane using distillation column at 745 kPa with 80% liquid fraction and separation of 5 component mixture at 945 kPa with 80% liquid fraction will be used as validation data. In this paper there were two case study taken to analyse energy minimizing on distillation column. First case study was to separate mixture of n-heptane, n-butane, n-hexane and n-heptane at 405.3 kPa with 80% liquid fraction. Meanwhile, separation mixture of benzene, toluene and oxylene at 586.8 kPa with 70% liquid fraction will be our second case study. The expected result from the V-min calculator is successfully minimizes the use of energy in distillation process by comparing each peak in V-min diagram. The lowest peak will consume the lowest energy.