The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	The Lewis-Matheson method on computer
Author:	Castner, William Raymond
View Online:	njit-etd1983-021 (v, 136 pages ~ 3.9 MB pdf)
Department:	Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry
Degree:	Master of Science
Program:	Chemical Engineering
Document Type:	Thesis
Advisory Committee:	McCormick, John E. (Committee chair) Huang, Ching-Rong (Committee member) Roche, Edward Charles, Jr. (Committee member)
Date:	1983-09
Keywords:	Distillation -- Computer programs Separation (Technology)
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	Lewis and Matheson, in the early 1930's, developed a manual calculation technique for the solution of multicomponent distillation problems. The object of this study was to see if there would be any advantage to using the Lewis-Matheson method, once incorporated onto a computer, over current multicomponent distillation solution techniques. The immediate advantage of using the L-M technique is that it requires fewer preliminary calculations than other computer methods. It was found that the L-M technique uses about half the execution time of a typical Newton-Raphson program, while using only one tenth the computer core (memory). This was not intended to be a direct comparison, however, since the Newton-Raphson program used is a far more rigorous program that takes into account the column energy balance, side streams, multiple feeds, and many condenser types. It was concluded that the accuracy of the L-M technique was not improved in the transformation to a computer program the problem area still being the ability to achieve a converged solution. Another problem area was found to be conversion difficulties when the feed key ratio is close to the distillate or bottoms key ratio.