The drivingforce diagram for a constant relative volatility binary mixture is obtained by plotting versus where and are the liquid and vapor mole fractions of the light component Explicitly the driving force is where is the relative volatility Two case are treated in the present Demonstration Optimal case The curve obtained is concave and one can easily find the location of the maximum point ie magenta point Let us take a saturated liquid feed with a composition given by the abscissa of the magenta point The line is the locus of the points of intersections for the operating lines corresponding to the largest actual driving force Thus if the feed plate is located on the line the resulting design will minimize the operating cost of the distillation column it simultaneously minimizes the reboil and reflux ratios If the reflux ratio is equal to then the operating lines shown in light blue intersect at The slope of the two light blue lines are identical which means that the minimum reflux and reboil ratios are equal For the operating lines are drawn in blue The slope of the operating lines in the drivingforce diagram can be easily related to the reboil and reflux ratios If these operating lines intersect exactly at then their slope is zero and we have the total reflux situation—this corresponds to operating lines in the McCabe–Thiele diagram given by the line Nonoptimal case Let us take a saturated liquid feed with a composition to be set by the user If the reflux ratio is equal to then the operating lines shown in light blue intersect at For the operating lines are drawn in blue The slope of the operating lines in the drivingforce diagram can be easily related to the reboil and reflux ratios This Demonstration plots the drivingforce diagram the operating lines for and You can change the value of the relative volatility of the mixture The McCabe–Thiele diagram is also given Finally the minimum reflux ratio is computed in the program by two methods 1 using the intersection of the feed line and the equilibrium curve which is the classical McCabe–Thiele method and 2 using the slope of the light blue operating lines in the drivingforce diagram Both methods give the same result for the minimum reflux ratio Finally for the optimal case the optimal feed location is calculated using the McCabe–Thiele diagram as well as the drivingforce diagram For the later approach one has the following relationship where the stages are counted from the top and is the abscissa of For lower values of the value of will be higher Indeed the separating driving force is smaller and the cost of the distillation will go up In this Demonstration it is assumed that distillate and bottom specifications are and mole respectively In order to compare the optimal and nonoptimal cases let us consider the nonoptimal case with abscissa of the magenta point Then the reboil ratio goes up while the reflux ratio goes down if they are compared to the reflux and reboil ratios of the optimal case The overall effect is an increase in the operating cost of the reboiler and the condenser ie heat duty Similarly when abscissa of the magenta point the reboil ratio goes down while the reflux ratio goes up when compared to their counterparts in the optimal case Again the overall effect is an increase in the operating cost of the reboiler and the condenser ie heat duty