A binary benzene-toluene distillation case study — a shortcut McCabe-Thiele-equivalent stage calculation, minimum and actual reflux ratio, feed-stage location, and a flooding-correlation column diameter, all worked from one 100 kmol/h feed.
The project brief: separate a 100 kmol/h benzene-toluene feed (zF = 0.40) into a 0.95 mole-fraction benzene distillate and a 0.05 mole-fraction benzene bottoms stream. Framed as this program's baseline separations project, it walks the full shortcut design sequence a process engineer would actually run — Fenske minimum stages, Underwood minimum reflux, the Gilliland correlation to actual stages, Kirkbride feed-stage location, and Souders-Brown flooding hydraulics for column diameter.
This module works every number from that single feed and product specification: the material balance that fixes distillate and bottoms flow, the reflux ratio decision that trades capital against operating cost, the tray-efficiency correction that turns theoretical stages into physical trays, and the reboiler/condenser duties that check each other through the saturated-feed energy balance. The full worked numbers, complete bill of materials, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.