Design, sizing and modeling of a reactive extractive distillation unit and solvent recovery system

Abstract

A new process to value a methanol + methyl acetate (MeOH + MeAc) azeotropic mixture by reactive extractive distillation with n-butanol (BuOH) using o-xylene as entrainer has been developed. High purity MeOH and butyl acetate (BuAc) were obtained as products. This chapter discusses how to synthesize (batch/continuous comparison, residue curve map analysis, and solvent selection), to size and rate the equipments (steady state simulation of the azeotropic separation, the reactive extractive distillation unit, and the solvent recovery system), and to perform the process dynamic modeling (control strategy, parameter tuning, and robustness analysis) of a reactive extractive distillation unit and solvent recovery system. Detailed analysis of the reactive and extractive distillation unit should be performed because of parameter coupling. The preliminary economic study carried out reveals that the process has no profitability. As expected, the process bottleneck is the reactive distillation unit and, in particular, the control strategy to achieve coupled targets.