Optimization and safety analysis for CO oxidative coupling reactor with co-current thermal management

Abstract

The CO oxidative coupling with methyl nitrite (MN) to dimethyl oxalate (DMO) in syngas-based ethylene glycol (EG) process faces challenges in low conversion and capacity per unit. In this work, by using a rigorous reactor model and NSGA-II algorithm, Pareto solutions balancing production capacity and safety were obtained to compare thermal control schemes. Under the specified domain, the optimized co-current-flow scheme achieved a DMO yield of 1.0 gDMO/(gcat∙h), surpassing the conventional isothermal-coolant scheme (0.55 gDMO/(gcat∙h)), and even under conservative conditions, the co-current scheme achieves 43% enhancement in capacity. Subsequently, the dynamic behavior of co-current reactor was compared with the isothermal-coolant one in much depth on the conditions determined by optimization of both performance and sensitivity. The results show that the reactor with co-current scheme provides the operators with twice more time to rectify operational biases, and an alarm of the wrong-way behavior when GHSV and inlet temperature are changed.