Design and control of butyl acrylate reactive distillation column system

In this study, the design and control of a reactive distillation column system for the production of butyl acrylate has been investigated. The proposed design is quite simple including only one reactive distillation column and an overhead decanter. The optimal design is selected based on the minimization of total annual cost (TAC) for the overall system. At this optimized flowsheet condition, output multiplicity was found with reboiler duty or feed ratio as the bifurcation parameter. The highest purity stable steady state was selected as the base case condition for the control study. The overall control of this system can be achieved with no on-line composition measurements. Simple single-point tray temperature control loop is designed to infer final product purity. From results of dynamic simulation, the proposed control strategy performs very well in rejecting various disturbances while maintaining butyl acrylate product at high purity. One of the important finding in this paper is that it is better to operate this reactive distillation column not at the exact feed stoichiometric balance point for better operability reason. The control performances of the proposed operating point and the operating condition right at the exact stoichiometric balance point will be compared.