Chemical Engineering October 2010 - 30

Fractionation Column
Zarko's challenge
E
very distillation engineer
west of the River
Neretva is familiar with
the work of Professor
Zarko Olujic. His distillation
laboratory at the Technical
University of Delft (The
Netherlands; www.tudelft.
nl) is one of the largest and
best facilities in the history of
distillation. His work is typically
funded by a consortium
of companies that, most recently,
included Bayer, BASF,
Evonik, DSM, Montz, Koch-Glitsch,
Praxair, Shell, Lummus, Akzo-Nobel,
BP, ECN and Sulzer Chemtech. Zarko
presently spends the majority of his
time in Croatia. He consults, and he is
still academically active at TU-Delft.
Zarko regularly chairs distillation
and absorption sessions at AIChE meetings.
He has, in fact, been named " European
Liaison " to the Distillation and Absorption
section of the Separations Div.
Alongside Nick Urbanski of ExxonMobil,
Zarko will be co-chairing six AIChE
Salt Lake City sessions next month.
I am wondering now whether Zarko
was in a " bad mood " when he attended
the March San Antonio AIChE meeting.
He seemed to be his usual cheerful,
energetic self when I had lunch
with him, but maybe the jet lag eventually
overpowered him.
Zarko's first San Antonio presentation
was regarding the HIDiC energy
conservation technology. HIDiC stands
for heat integrated distillation column.
Basically, and briefly, with HIDiC, vapors
from the stripping section are
compressed (and heated) and sent to
the rectifying section, and then the
heat of the rectifying section is used
to drive the stripping section. Zarko
boldly wondered out loud why energy
reduction technologies like HIDiC
were not getting more attention in the
U.S. He went further, wondering why
column size records were being broken
outside, not inside, the U.S. He referred
to a European propylene tower
21.5 ft dia. and 330 ft tall (tangent to
tangent)! While on a roll, he described
how European companies are considering
concepts like an " entire refinery
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30 ChemiCal engineering www.Che.Com oCtober 2010
in one shell, " (funsters in the audience
nicknamed this concept " EROS " ).
Zarko's second San Antonio presentation
described a four-product dividing
wall column (DWC). He stated that
almost 100 three-product DWCs have
been final-designed in Europe or built
in Europe, with a certain two companies
leading the way at designing and
using such columns. He implied that
U.S. engineering and operating companies
seem to be reticent to use this
technology. In response to Zarko's comment,
two audience members representing
U.S. companies stated, " We are
working on such columns. " Nevertheless,
it appears that the U.S. is behind
Europe regarding DWCs. In fact, at the
May AIChE meeting there was only
one paper on DWC's - Zarko's paper.
Compare that to the European Federation
of Chemical Engineering's (EFCE)
distillation and adsorption meeting
last month in Eindhoven, where eleven
papers were presented on the topic.
I was the co-chair of the San Antonio
AIChE distillation sessions. At the end
of Zarko's second presentation, I stood
up and asked him, " Why do you keep
looking right at me? " He claimed that he
was not, but his public comments during
the three-day San Antonio sessions
are not easily forgotten. Are the European
engineers thinking outside the
boxes? Are they breaking paradigms,
especially regarding energy reduction,
that we all ought to be breaking? ■
Mike Resetarits
Mike Resetarits is the technical director at
FRI (resetarits@fri.org), a distillation research
consortium headquartered in Stillwater, Okla.
Each month, Mike shares his first-hand experience
in this column.
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Chemical Engineering October 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chemical Engineering October 2010
