DYNAMIC SIMULATION OF REACTIVE DISTILLATION PROCESSES TO PREDICT START-UP BEHAVIOR

In the last years, the integration of reaction and distillation in one process, has gained more interest. The mixing of these two operations is especially convenient and shows many advantages. The startup procedure of a conventional distillation column spends a lot of time and energy besides producing offspec products. In reactive distillation, this problem becomes worse once the product cannot be easily recycled, making the start-up procedure very costintensive. In this work, the dynamic simulation of reactive distillation columns is studied in order to analyze different startup procedures. Different strategies were implemented and simulated. Furthermore, an evaluation of uncertainties in model parameters on the startup time was carried out.