Professor Maher,

We made a couple of errors in our presentation on the distillation column experiment, and
wanted to take this opportunity to address these issues. First of all we incorrectly stated that
HYSYS was an insufficient tool to accurately model a real distillation column. HYSYS is a very
good tool to model real life distillation columns, though there are certain conditions that set it
apart from the real column we used. For example, by default HYSYS will set tray efficiency to
100%, leading to a less accurate modeling of actual column internals. This can be seen from the
deviation between our data and the HYSYS temperature and composition data. Secondly we also
used HYSYS incorrectly to size our distillation column. Additionally, we were mistaken in a
couple of the numbers we presented for our column. Lastly, we should have reported that we can
get a reflux ratio of 3.6 if we go to 11 stages, and condenser and reboiler duties around 2500 and
1500 kJ/h respectively.
Kind Regards
The Jackson 5!