Intensified thermal integration in batch reactive distillation

Published work on the heat integration of batch distillation is scare and mainly focuses on the continuous flow columns. This paper introduces a novel thermally integrated batch reactive distillation, in which, the rectification tower runs as usual at atmospheric pressure and the concentric reboiler operates under vacuum. It is inspected that the proposed thermally integrated batch reactive distillation with a concentric vacuum reboiler secures positive savings of energy and better economic figures than the conventional batch reactive distillation. Importantly, this scheme has the potential to enhance the product purity at steady state by the improvement of reaction conversion. For boosting both the energetic and economic performance of the proposed thermally integrated batch distillation scheme, in this contribution, we introduce further intensification by coupling the overhead vapor and the reboiler liquid.

► This contribution introduces a thermally integrated batch distillation with chemical reaction.
► The concentric reboiler surrounds the rectification tower and operates under vacuum.
► Heat integration provides positive savings in energy as well as cost.
► Further intensification is made for improving the overall efficiency.