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This paper addresses an industrially important problem of acetic acid recovery from a waste water stream via reactive distillation. The presence of a three-phase regime on the column stages due to a liquid-liquid phase split between aqueous and organic phases is a typical characteristic of this process. A modern modeling approach is presented to detect the existence of potential phase splitting in this column. A good agreement of a phase splitting model with the literature data has been shown. A theoretical study for the recovery of acetic acid from its 30 wt% aqueous solution by esterification with nbutanol is presented. Alternate column structures were investigated and two structures rendering theoretically close to 100% conversion of acetic acid were identified. The dynamic simulations were performed on proposed structures to see transient responses wrt. to common process disturbances.

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