Experimental study of the operating characteristics of a heat pump assisted distillation system using R11 as the external working fluid

Heat pump assisted distillation with an external working fluid is one of the most obvious methods to reduce the energy consumption in a distillation process. The heat pump working fluid extracts heat from the top of the column, increases the temperature of the recovered heat and recycles it to provide the heat input to the reboiler. The interaction between the external parameters and the internal parameters for a specially designed heat pump assisted distillation system has been studied experimentally. The external parameters were mass flow rate, temperature and concentration of the feed, the concentration of the top and bottom products and the mass flow rate of the working fluid. The effects of the variations of these external parameters on the internal parameters such as the energy (steam) consumption, the actual coefficient of performance and the temperatures at the top and bottom of the column, together with the condensation and evaporation temperatures, are presented.