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Dimethyl ether (DME) is one of the promising alternatives to fossil fuels. The reactive distillation (RD) dynamic intensification process for DME production was investigated in previous reports. However, there are no investigations on the control of the RD dynamic intensification process and the design of the downstream methanol recovery process. In this paper, three DME production processes comprising the conventional process, RD coupled double-effect distillation process, and hybrid membrane RD process are proposed and optimized in terms of the minimum total annual cost. It is demonstrated that the hybrid membrane RD process performs the best in terms of economy and energy efficiency. Subsequently, two control structures are presented for the RD dynamic intensification process. The results illustrate that the improved structure with a high selector performs the best in controllability. Moreover, two plant-wide control structures are established for the hybrid membrane RD process with dynamic process intensification. The results show that the improved structure with temperature−composition cascade control loops exhibits the best robust performance.

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