Design and control of a heat-integrated reactive distillation system for the hydrolysis of methyl acetate

There is increasing interest in the heat-integrated reactive distillation systems, lately. In this Article, two types of heat-integrated reactive distillation systems for the hydrolysis of methyl acetate are investigated. One type is to use the concept of internally heat-integrated distillation column (HIDiC) as applied to the reactive distillation system. Another type for the heat integration is to use a multieffect distillation concept by splitting the feed to enter into two smaller reactive distillation columns operated at different pressures. Rigorous simulation study has been conducted to compare the optimal flowsheet of the above two designs. It is found that, although the first design can save operating costs by 8.05%, due to the high cost of the compressor needed in the system, the total annual cost is 33.13% higher than that of the base design without heat integration. On the contrary, the multieffect distillation design not only saves operating cost by 15.19%, but also saves the total annual cost by 6.42%. The overall control strategy of this proposed heat-integrated design has also been developed. Only tray temperature control loops are needed to properly reject feed disturbances.