Attainable regions of reactive distillation—Part I. Single reactant non-azeotropic systems

Reactive distillation (RD), a promising multifunctional reactor, can be used to improve the selectivity of the desired product by manipulating the concentration profiles in the reactive zone of the column. In this work, a new approach has been proposed to obtain the feasible regions of RD for the reactive systems involving single reactants, e.g. dimerization, aldol condensation, etc. Two new models namely the reactive condenser and the reactive re-boiler have been proposed. These models indicate the best location of the reactive zone in a column. Multistage versions of these models namely, reactive rectification and reactive stripping further expand the feasible region and are capable of representing the performance offered by a conventional RD unit. Several hypothetical non-azeotropic ideal systems have been extensively studied using these models and it has been shown that selectivity close to 100% is attainable over the entire range of conversion for a series as well as a combination of series and parallel reactions with positive reaction orders. Two industrially important cases of aldol condensation of acetone and dimerization of isobutylene have also been addressed using this approach. For porous catalysts, the presence of intra-particle diffusion resistance may limit the feasible region and even in the case of ideal non-azeotropic systems it may not be possible to obtain 100% selectivity. A methodology to incorporate pore diffusion effects is also illustrated.