Distillation Column
A runnable flowsheet, in your browser.

What's in the flowsheet

• A feed source with a defined composition, temperature, and flow rate.
• A multi-stage column with feed-stage location, reflux ratio, and reboiler duty as the operating handles.
• A condenser, reflux drum, and reboiler — wired with the standard recycle topology.
• Distillate and bottoms product streams with composition and flow readouts.
• An NRTL property package (swap to UNIQUAC, Peng-Robinson, or SRK as appropriate for your system).

What to try first

1. Run the flowsheet as-is and note the distillate purity.
2. Increase the reflux ratio by 20%. Purity rises; reboiler duty rises faster — the classic energy trade-off.
3. Move the feed stage one tray up. Watch the bottoms purity drop.
4. Swap the components (the component database has ~hundreds of common species) and see whether the column still works at the same operating point.

How it converges

The column is solved with an inside-out tray-by-tray method. The reflux loop closes via the recycle solver (Wegstein-accelerated direct substitution), with a default tolerance of 1×10^-3 on the composition residual. For a clean binary at moderate reflux this typically converges in 5–10 outer iterations.

The whole calculation runs in your browser. No data is uploaded; nothing leaves the page. You can save the flowsheet as a JSON file and reload it later — or share it as a file alongside a paper or a homework solution.

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