Rigorous design and economic optimization of reactive distillation column considering real liquid hold-up and hydraulic conditions of industrial device

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The liquid hold-up in a reactive distillation (RD) column not only has a significant impact on the extent of reactions, but also affects the pressure drop and hydraulic conditions in the column. Therefore, the liquid hold-up would be a critical design factor for RD columns. However, the existing design methods for RD columns typically neglect the influence of considerable amount of liquid hold-up in downcomers owing to the difficulties of solving a large-scale nonlinear model system by considering downcomer hydraulics, resulting in significant deviations from actual situation and even operation infeasibility of the designed column. In this paper, a pseudo-transient (PT) RD model based on equilibrium model considering tray hydraulics was established for rigorous simulation and optimization of RD plate columns considering the liquid hold-up both in downcomers and column trays, and a steady-state optimization algorithm assisted by the PT model was adopted to robustly solve the optimization problem. The optimization results of either ethylene glycol RD or methyl acetate RD demonstrated that assuming all the liquid hold-up of a stage belonged to the tray will cause significant deviations in the column diameter, weir height, and the number of stages, which leads to not meeting the separation requirements and even operation hydraulic infeasibility. The rigorous model proposed in this study which considers the liquid hold-up both on trays and in downcomers as well as hydraulic constraints can be applied to systematically design industrial RD plate columns to simultaneously obtain optimal operating variables and equipment structure variables.