Distillation absorption 2010 : conference proceedings, 12-15 September 2010 Eindhoven, The Netherlands

It has been 50 years since the first Distillation & Absorption conference was held in Brighton in 1960. The first meetings were held in Brighton at approximately ten-year intervals and therefore become known as ‘the Brighton Conferences’. In 1987, it was recognized that more frequent meetings were needed, so the next conferences were in 1992 in Birmingham (UK), 1997 in Maastricht (Netherlands), 2002 in Baden-Baden (Germany) and the last in 2006 in London (UK). Distillation and Absorption are hugely important industrial separation technologies. They are used to produce the world’s petroleum fuels; to treat most of our natural gas; and are a critical element in a host of processes making the chemicals and other products that the world needs. Furthermore absorption has regained tremendous interest in its application to carbon capture. Large in scale, and heavy in energy usage, there are enormous incentives to introduce new and improved methods and equipment to improve the sustainability of these operations. These proceedings present the collected papers of the 9th International Conference on Distillation & Absorption held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in September 2010 and include 117 papers selected from 200 submitted abstracts. Of these contributions, 7 were plenary lectures, 52 scientific lectures and 58 were posters. Additionally 10 last minute posters were presented and a number of exhibitors also presented their contributions at the conference. The papers cover a broad range of topics from the estimation of physical properties to the design and performance of contacting devices, and demonstrate a remarkably high rate of advance in the technology. Special topics during this conference were energy efficiency and carbon dioxide capture. Our understanding of the behaviour of distillation and absorption processes is continuing to improve rapidly, resulting in new methods of control, better process integration, more effective equipment, novel schemes for reactive and extractive distillation as well as for hybrid processes, and in the many other developments described in the papers in these proceedings.