USE OF A BATCH REACTIVE DISTILLATION WITH DYNAMIC OPTIMIZATION STRATEGY TO ACHIEVE INDUSTRIAL GRADE ETHYL ACETATE

Abstract

Industrial grade ethyl acetate is available with minimum purity of 85.0%. It is mostly produced by an ethanol esterification in a distillation process on both batch and continuous modes. However, researches on high purity production with short operating time are rarely achieved. Therefore, the objective in this work is to study an approach to produce ethyl acetate of 90.0% by 8 hours using a batch reactive distillation column. Based on open‐loop simulations, the distillation with constant reflux ratio cannot achieve the product specification. Thus, the dynamic optimization strategy is proposed to handle this problem. For the process safety—preventing the dried column and fractured, a minimum reflux ratio must be determined in advance and then an optimal reflux profile is calculated to achieve optimal product yield. Simulation results show that the industrial grade ethyl acetate can be produced by the dynamic optimization programming with two or more time intervals. Besides, the increasing of time intervals can produce more distillate product.