Rigorous design of distillation columns using surrogate models based on Kriging interpolation

The economic design of a distillation column or distillation sequences is a challenging problem that has been addressed by superstructure approaches. However, these methods have not been widely used because they lead to mixed‐integer nonlinear programs that are hard to solve, and require complex initialization procedures. In this article, we propose to address this challenging problem by substituting the distillation columns by Kriging‐based surrogate models generated via state of the art distillation models. We study different columns with increasing difficulty, and show that it is possible to get accurate Kriging‐based surrogate models. The optimization strategy ensures that convergence to a local optimum is guaranteed for numerical noise‐free models. For distillation columns (slightly noisy systems), Karush–Kuhn–Tucker optimality conditions cannot be tested directly on the actual model, but still we can guarantee a local minimum in a trust region of the surrogate model that contains the actual local minimum. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 61: 2169–2187, 2015