An industrial design/control study for the vinyl acetate monomer process

Abstract

This work presents design details of an industrial process for the manufacture of vinyl acetate monomer. Our purpose is to offer a realistic example that is uniquely suited for academic researchers pursuing simulation, design, and control studies. The vinyl acetate process has common, real chemical components. It contains many standard unit operations in a realistic flowsheet. And it illustrates the types of systems of industrial research interest in the areas of process design, optimization, simulation, and control. Vapor-phase reactions convert ethylene, oxygen, and acetic acid into vinyl acetate with water and carbon dioxide as byproducts. The process contains a packed tubular reactor, a feed-effluent heat exchanger, an absorber, a vaporizer, an azeotropic distillation column with decanter, and both gas and liquid recycle streams. All physical property, kinetic, and flowsheet data have been compiled from sources in the open literature. We detail the flowsheet information required to construct rigorous steady state and dynamic mathematical models of the process and present the process control requirements and objectives. Finally, we briefly describe the rigorous nonlinear dynamic simulation we have constructed for this process using TMODS, DuPont’s in-house dynamic simulator. Models of this process have also been developed by Aspen Technology and Hyprotech in their commercial simulators and are available directly from the vendors.