Pibouleau, L.; Domenech, S. Une procédure arborescente pour la séparation de mélanges complexes dans l’industrie chimique. Application à un train de colonnes de rectification. (French) Zbl 0567.90063 RAIRO, Rech. Opér. 19, 35-56 (1985). The problem of the optimal separation of complex multicomponent mixtures, is solved with a branch and bound procedure. For a given multicomponent feed at a known state, the procedure finds a set of separators arrangements giving the goal products, with a total lower cost, where the total cost is the sum of the annual cost of utilities with the annualized cost of equipment. This set of solutions contains the one of minimal cost, and all the sequences whose costs are within a specified factor of the minimal cost. An application is given in the field of the complex multicomponent rectification, in order to synthetize the sequence of rectification columns with the minimal cost. In that case, the lower bound is defined with the help of an heuristic rule. In order to illustrate the optimization procedure two numerical examples are worked out in detail. MSC: 90B99 Operations research and management science Keywords:process synthesis; optimal separation; branch and bound; complex multicomponent rectification; heuristic PDF BibTeX XML Cite \textit{L. Pibouleau} and \textit{S. Domenech}, RAIRO, Rech. Opér. 19, 35--56 (1985; Zbl 0567.90063) Full Text: DOI EuDML OpenURL