Conceptual design aspects of reactive distillation processes for ideal binary mixtures

Abstract

A comparative study on the conceptual design of reactive distillation process configurations is presented, considering the reversible reaction A 1⇔A 2 in an ideal binary mixture as simple model system. The analysed flow schemes are a reactor-distillation column sequence with an external recycle loop, the same recycle system with a prereactor, a nonreactive distillation column on top of a reactive reboiler, a fully reactive distillation column, and a hybrid distillation column combining a reactive and a nonreactive section. For these configurations, the design aspects are discussed in terms of the most important operating parameters, kinetic parameters and design parameters.