Design and Control of a Methyl Methacrylate Separation Process with a Middle Decanter

Abstract

In an industrial process to produce methyl methacrylate, a mixture including methyl methacrylate, methanol, and water needs to be separated. The methyl methacrylate and water are designed to be drawn out of this separation process as two product streams while methanol as an excess reactant should be recycled back to the esterification reactor. An industrial feasible design flowsheet includes three columns, a decanter and two internal recycle streams. In this work, a simple design flowsheet is devised with a distillation column, a bottom decanter, and a stripper. This column/decanter/stripper design can further be simplified into an even simpler design flowsheet with only one distillation column with sidedraw and a middle decanter. Optimal design and dynamic control of this simplified separation process are investigated in this paper. It is shown that the product purity specifications can be maintained despite feed disturbances by holding a tray temperature above the sidedraw location and another one below the sidedraw location.