Modeling and control of reactive distillation processes involving significant disturbances

Abstract

Reactive distillation has received a lot of attention as part of process intensification efforts in the last few decades. Reactive distillation processes can result in energy savings and can be utilized to selectively react components of a mixture where the reaction itself may not be selective. However, combining reaction and separation into a single vessel often results into complex dynamic behavior. This problem is further complicated when the process is expected to be subjected to significant disturbances. Despite the benefits and the prevalence of reactive distillation columns in industry, most of the available literature focuses on a few select processes which are economically of lesser interest. As such, this work focuses on benzene hydrogenation via reactive distillation as it is both an important and challenging problem, albeit one with relatively few results published in the open literature. The process under investigation also involves a partial condenser and a recycle stream which are known to significantly alter the dynamics of distillation columns. In order to accurately understand the dynamic behavior of the process, a first principles-based dynamic model was built in gPROMS.