The overall objective of this work is to simulate an industrial relevant extractive distillation column equipped with Intalox Metal Tower Packing (IMTP) for purification of n-butane from 1-butene,cis-2-butene and trans-2-butene mixture (C4) using N-Methylpyrrolidone (NMP) as entrainer.In order to highlight inconsistencies in the modeling of heat transfer in multicomponent extractive distillation column,both equilibrium stage models (EQ) and rigorous rate based models (NEQ) incorporating with Maxwell-Stefan diffusion equations were developed in AspenONE(@) simulator,and Dortmund Modified UNIFAC thermodynamic model was used to calculate activity coefficients.To explore and understand the reasons behind the different trajectories followed by EQ and NEQ models explicit investigations were made on component Murphee efficiency,effective interfacial area,heat transfer coefficient and interfacial heat transfer rate.The simulation results were compared with well known literature correlations and experimental measurements.