To adhere to the application-oriented education mode, cultivate and improve the students' comprehensive ability of petrochemical production process control and detection instrument analysis and management, a virtual simulation experiment of distillation separation automatic control is designed and developed. The platform includes three functional learning modules, in which the experiment covers six aspects: learning the key points of process control knowledge, plant device process exploration, instrument device operation, inspection instrument maintenance, distillation DCS control system operation and distillation tower control loop parameter setting. The virtual simulation experiment solves the problems of strict safety requirements, which is a difficult problem for experiments with high energy consumption and automatic control experiments of distillation separation that cannot be carried out in schools. The virtual simulation experiment platform helps to expand the teaching function of conventional experiment, improve the richness of experimental courses, stimulate the students' interest in doing experiments, and provide practical learning content for cultivating application-oriented talents with strong professional background knowledge and engineering practice ability.