Increasing energy demand, consequently high crude oil prices and growing concern for pollution motivated the researchers to explore more energy-efficient and environment-friendly process technologies. Although the heat integrated distillation has been researched for a number of decades, unfortunately it has not yet been commercialized mainly due to high investment cost, complex equipment design, control problem in consequence of severe interaction and nonlinearity, and lack of experimental data at sufficiently large scale to verify the theoretical predictions. It is true that some progress has been made in theory but for practical applications many questions still remain. Among the broader research needs the following areas are identified for heat integrated distillation column: rigorous dynamic modeling, optimal design, multiple steady state analysis, system identification, synthesis and implementation of high-quality nonlinear control, and importantly experimental evaluation. It is also suggested to investigate the feasibility of heat integration in the reactive distillation schemes and in the two distillation columns having no direct connections.
