A control strategy for extractive and reactive dividing wall columns

Dividing wall Columns (DWC) are being an important breakthrough in distillation technology due to the energy consumption and capital cost reduction they provide. There is an increasing amount of research papers devoted to DWCs although most of them present different applications and DWC setups like extractive DWC, azeotropic DWC or reactive DWC. These units have strong interactions in their operation and to achieve a good control is of great importance to guarantee a smooth and stable performance. Although control of standard DWCs has been presented somewhere else, in this work we present the control of an extractive and a reactive DWC. We establish the decentralized structure as well as a model predictive control and compare both approaches.