Development of a plant-wide Dimethyl Oxalate (DMO) synthesis process from syngas: Rigorous design and optimization

The rigorous design and optimization of a complex, plant-wide dimethyl oxalate (DMO) synthesis process from syngas is firstly developed in this work. The whole process can be roughly divided into two sections. The first one is to produce DMO through the coupling reaction, in which CO is reacted with the intermediate, methyl nitrite (MN). This section includes the production, and also the purification of DMO. The second one is the regeneration reaction to get back MN through a packed column reactor, which is simulated as a modified version of reactive distillation column. After the basic design, systematic optimization is investigated through minimizing total annual cost, and the potential heat integration strategy is also proposed. During optimization, we found that the methanol circulation rate inside the process is the most influential variable, and a higher methanol flow rate (defined as MeOH/NOs) within an acceptable region leads to better economic performance.