Design and control of butyl acrylate reactive distillation column system

in this study, the design and control of a reactive distillation column system for the production of butyl acrylate has been investigated. The proposed design is quite simple including only one reactive distillation column and an overhead decanter. The optimal design is selected based on the minimization of Total Annual Cost (TAC) for the overall system. At this optimized flowsheet condition, output multiplicity was found with reboiler duty as the bifurcation parameter. The highest purity stable steady state was selected as the base case condition for the control study. The overall control of this system is achieved with no on-line composition measurements. Tray temperature control loop will be designed to infer final product purity. From Aspen Dynamics simulation, the proposed control strategy performs very well in rejecting various disturbances while maintaining butyl acrylate product at high purity.