Novel Reactive Distillation Process for Cyclohexyl Acetate Production: Design, Optimization, and Control

Yabo Hu; Le Wang; Jiawei Lu; Lianghui Ding; Guowen Zhang; Zhuxiu Zhang; Jihai Tang; Mifen Cui; Xian Chen; Xu Qiao

doi:10.1021/acsomega.3c00469

Novel Reactive Distillation Process for Cyclohexyl Acetate Production: Design, Optimization, and Control

ACS Omega. 2023 Mar 30;8(14):13192-13201. doi: 10.1021/acsomega.3c00469. eCollection 2023 Apr 11.

Authors

Yabo Hu¹, Le Wang¹, Jiawei Lu¹, Lianghui Ding², Guowen Zhang¹, Zhuxiu Zhang¹, Jihai Tang¹, Mifen Cui¹, Xian Chen¹, Xu Qiao¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Materials-Oriented Chemical Engineering, College of Chemical Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing 211816, PR China.
² School of Environmental Engineering, Nanjing Institute of Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu 211167, China.

Abstract

A side-reactor column (SRC) configuration, comprising a vacuum column coupled with atmospheric side reactors, is proposed to overcome the thermodynamic restriction in the esterification of cyclohexene with acetic acid to produce cyclohexyl acetate. Meantime, this configuration can avoid the utilization of the high-pressure steam and provide enough zone for catalyst loading. In order to obtain the minimum total annual cost (TAC), the process is optimized by a mixed-integer nonlinear programming optimization method based on the improved bat algorithm. The results indicate that the optimized SRC configuration saves about 44.81% of the TAC compared to the reactive distillation process. Based on the optimized SRC process, dynamic control is carried out. The dual-point temperature and temperature-composition control structures are proposed to reject throughput and feed composition disturbances. The dynamic performances demonstrate that the temperature-composition control structure is better in maintaining product purity.