DYNAMICS OF DISTILLATION PROCESSES .3. TOPOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF TERNARY RESIDUE CURVE MAPS

The differential equations describing the simple distillation of azeotropic ternary mixtures place a physically meaningful structure (tangent vector field) on ternary phase diagrams. By recognizing that such structures are subject to the Poincaré-Hopf index theorem it has been possible to obtain a topological relationship between the azeotropes and pure components occurring in a ternary mixture. This relationship gives useful information about the distillation behavior of ternary mixtures and also predicts situations in which ternary azeotropes cannot occur. © 1979.