Experimental operation of a reactive dividing wall column and comparison with simulation results

Abstract

Reactive dividing wall columns (RDWC) are a special type of distillation column that allow for the targeted realization of chemical reactions and the separation into multiple product fractions in one shell. However, despite their huge economical and ecological potentials for certain fields of application, this innovative technology has not found its way into industrial production processes yet. The very limited availability of experimental research studies verifying the prediction capabilities of respective modeling concepts for this type of distillation column might be one decisive reason for that. Therefore, the present study puts its focus on the detailed comparison between experimental operation of RDWC and the corresponding simulation results for steady‐state. For the first time, the mentioned comparison is carried out for a chemical system with non‐negligible side reactions. It is shown that even for this highly complex system, the mathematical model is capable of predicting the column operation. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 63: 1036–1050, 2017

Enzymatic catalyzed reactive dividing wall column: Experiments and model validation

“…It is important to point out that the reaction occurs without any side products. Experiments from Ehlers et al 26 with the same transesterification reaction and Amberlyst 35 Dry as a catalyst showed the formation of e.g., ethers and alkenes. The high selectivity of the enzymatic catalyst enables the production without side products and therefore reduces the need for a further purification step for the reaction products in order to remove unwanted side products.…”

“…The eRDWC column employed in this study is based at the Institute of Process and Plant Engineering from the University of Technology Hamburg. Earlier studies have been conducted for a non‐reactive dividing wall column setup and reactive experiments with a chemical catalyst …”

“…The presented model is based on the reactive dividing wall column model developed at the Department of Process and Plant Design at the Hamburg University of Technology. 26 All model equations are implemented and solved in Aspen Custom Modeler V.8.4. The software enables the development of process models from scratch.…”

Process Intensification – An Unbroken Trend in Chemical Engineering

“…Today the columns can be designed in a way that they show a high degree of flexibility and can be applied in multi‐purpose environments with changing separation tasks. Extractive distillation is industrially realized in DWC , and academia is working on reactive DWC , . Due to constructive, operational, thermodynamic or hydrodynamic requirements, the partitioning walls can nowadays be welded inside the columns or plugged without the need of welding, they can be placed off‐center, be extended to the top or the bottom of the columns, for example in the case of extractive distillation, and can be realized as a tube.…”

Multi‐criteria Optimization of an Industrial World‐Scale Process

“…Its purpose is to separate a ternary mixture with only one unit operation. The concept can even be extended to reactive distillation, as reported, e.g., by Ehlers et al recently [20]. The facility is supposed to have only a single dividing wall and, hence, it is modeled as a prefractionator [21], i.e., with two standard distillation columns, only the second one of which has a reboiler and a condenser.…”