Multi-Effect Evaporation Coupled with MVR Heat Pump Thermal Integration Distillation for Separating Salt Containing Methanol Wastewater

Due to the high energy consumption for separation of salt containing methanol wastewater, in this work, the multi-effect evaporation coupled with mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) heat pump and thermal integration technologies were raised for the first time. The ELECNRTL thermodynamic model is used to simulate and optimize the evaporation rectification process. Energy consumption and total annual cost (TAC) are taken as objective functions. The results show that multi-effect evaporation coupled with conventional distillation process can save energy consumption and TAC by 44.12% and 39.14%. The multi-effect evaporation coupled with distillation process based on MVR heat pump technology can save energy consumption and TAC by 55.27% and 47.49%, which is super to three-effect evaporation coupled with conventional distillation process. The three-effect evaporation coupled with MVR heat integration process can save energy consumption and TAC by 81.32% and 58.55%, which is more economical than other processes. It can be clearly seen that three-effect evaporation coupled with MVR heat integration process is more competitive to deal with the salt containing methanol wastewater.