Simulation and design of a heat-integrated double-effect reactive distillation process for propylene glycol methyl ether production

Abstract

A double-effect reactive distillation (DERD) process was proposed for the production of propylene glycol methyl ether from propylene oxide and methanol to overcome the shortcoming of low selectivity and high-energy consumption in the tubular plug-flow reactor. A single-column reactive distillation (RD) process was conducted under optimized operating conditions based on sensitivity analysis as a reference. The results demonstrated that the proposed DERD process is able to achieve more than 95% selectivity of the desired product. After that, a design approach of the DERD process with an objective of the minimum operating cost was proposed to achieve further energy savings in the RD process. The proposed DERD configuration can provide a large energy-savings by totally utilization of the overhead vapor steam in the high-pressure RD column. A comparison of the single-column RD process revealed that the proposed DERD process can reduce the operating cost and the total annual cost of 25.3% and 30.7%, respectively, even though the total capital cost of DERD process is larger than that of the RD process.