Effect of Solvent Content and Heat Integration on the Controllability of Extractive Distillation Process for Anhydrous Ethanol Production

Abstract

Considering that an analysis of both dynamic behavior and controllability of an extractive distillation process is important, and also taking into consideration the absence of studies in literature related to the influence of heat integration and solvent content on the controllability of this process, this work aims to investigate such aspects, or more specifically, investigate the dynamic responses in the presence of feed disturbances when operating at high, medium, and low solvent content. The production of anhydrous ethanol as the main product with ethylene glycol as solvent was the case study in this work, and a control scheme based on recent studies was used to perform this study. It was verified that the solvent content in the extractive section has an influence on top product composition when feed flow rate and composition disturbances are introduced in the azeotropic mixture feed stream; the system with high solvent content presented the highest offsets. The results also showed that the presence o...