Page "Distillation" Paragraph 14

With the emergence of chemical engineering as a discipline at the end of the 19th century, scientific rather than empirical methods could be applied.

The developing petroleum industry in the early 20th century provided the impetus for the development of accurate design methods such as the McCabe-Thiele method and the Fenske equation.

The availability of powerful computers has also allowed direct computer simulation of distillation columns.