Semicontinuous separation of dimethyl ether (DME) produced from biomass

Pascall, Alicia; Adams, Thomas A.

doi:10.1002/cjce.21813

Cited by 26 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Recently, increasing attention has been directed towards the production of alternative, environmentally friendly fuels thereby decreasing the dependency on crude oil and affording associated improvements towards the mitigation of air pollution . There are numerous cleaner fuel sources available such as biogas, hydrogen or, dimethyl ether (DME), with the latter being one of the most promising alternatives . DME has been utilised in a broad range of applications and since the early 1990s has been considered as an alternative for diesel vehicles .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Surface hydrophobicity and acidity effect on alumina catalyst in catalytic methanol dehydration reaction

Osman

Abu‐Dahrieh

Rooney

et al. 2017

J. Chem. Technol. Biotechnol

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BACKGROUNDMethanol to dimethyl ether (MTD) is considered one of the main routes for the production of clean bio‐fuel. The effect of copper loading on the catalytic performance of different phases of alumina that formed by calcination at two different temperatures was examined for the dehydration of methanol to dimethyl ether (DME).RESULTSA range of Cu loadings of (1, 2, 4, 6, 10 and 15% Cu wt/wt) on Al2O3 calcined at 350 and 550 °C were prepared and characterized by TGA, XRD, BET, NH3‐TPD, TEM, H2‐TPR, SEM, EDX, XPS and DRIFT‐Pyridine techniques. The prepared catalysts were used in a fixed bed reactor under reaction conditions in which the temperature ranged from 180–300 °C with weight hourly space velocity (WHSV) = 12.1 h‐1. It was observed that all catalysts calcined at 550 °C (γ‐Al2O3 support phase) exhibited higher activity than those calcined at 350 °C (γ‐AlOOH), and this is due to the phase support change. Furthermore, the optimum Cu loading was found to be 6% Cu/γ‐Al2O3 with this catalyst also showing a high degree of stability under steady state conditions and this is attributed to the enhancement in surface acidity and hydrophobicity.CONCLUSIONThe addition of copper to the support improved the catalyst properties and activity. For all the copper modified catalysts, the optimum catalyst with high degree of activity and stability was 6% copper loaded on gamma alumina. © 2017 The Authors. Journal of Chemical Technology & Biotechnology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Surface hydrophobicity and acidity effect on alumina catalyst in catalytic methanol dehydration reaction

Osman

Abu‐Dahrieh

Rooney

et al. 2017

J. Chem. Technol. Biotechnol

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“…In this study, either the reactor product stream is sent to a conventional distillation sequence (also known as the "direct sequence") in which DME is recovered in the distillate of the first column and in which the bottoms product is sent to a second column where methanol is removed at the top and water is removed at the bottom 1 . Although there are process intensification techniques to perform this three component separation in only one column (such as semicontinuous distillation Pascall and Adams, 2013 or dividing wall distillation Kiss, 2013), we have chosen the classic approach for illustrative purposes. In both trains, the columns are designed to meet the following specifications: the DME product must be chemical grade purity (99.95 mol% Müller and Hübsch, 2000), the methanol product must be chemical grade purity (99.85 mol% Ott et al, 2011), the water product should be 99.99 mol% pure.…”

Section: Flexible Base Case Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This method was chosen as the physical property package because we found it to match very well with the ternary experimental vapor-liquid phase equilibria at 9.74 bar and 353 K (Song et al, 2006; close to the feed conditions), with an R 2 above 0.993. It should be noted that the PRWS method is also an appropriate choice (Pascall and Adams, 2013). For a given number of stages above and below the feed, the Design Spec tool is used to ensure that the product purity specifications are met for each column by varying the reflux and boilup ratios.…”

Section: Process Simulationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Optimal Design of a Distillation System for the Flexible Polygeneration of Dimethyl Ether and Methanol Under Uncertainty

et al. 2018

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Two process designs for the separation section of a flexible dimethyl ether and methanol polygeneration plant are presented, as well as an optimization method which can determine the optimal design under market uncertainty quickly and to global optimality without loss of model fidelity. The polygeneration plant produces a product mixture that is either mostly dimethyl ether or mostly methanol depending on market conditions by using a classic two-stage dimethyl ether production catalytic reaction route in which the second stage is bypassed when the market demand is such that methanol production is more favorable than dimethyl ether. The downstream distillation sequence is designed to purify the products to desired specifications despite the wide variability in feed condition that corresponds to the upstream reaction system operating either in DME-rich or methanol-rich mode. Because the optimal design depends on uncertain market conditions (realized as the percentage of the time in which the plant operates in either DME-rich or methanol-rich mode), this uncertainty is considered in the formulation of the optimal design problem. The results show that using one set of flexible distillation columns for two different objectives is superior to the "traditional" approach of using two different sets of distillation columns which are each optimized for one specific operating condition. Different approaches to design under uncertainty were considered, with a scenario-based two-stage stochastic formulation with a uniform distribution of the uncertain parameter recommended as the preferred formulation.

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“…Among many examples in literature, Leboreiro and Acevedo [26] successfully demonstrated the use of a modified GA interconnected with the Aspen Plus process simulator to optimize complex distillation sequences including a Petlyuk column. Pascall and Adams [29] made use of a PSO algorithm connected to Aspen Dynamics to optimize a novel semicontinuous system for the separation of DME from methanol and water. In that work PSO was used to optimize the controller tuning parameters of the system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design of dividing wall columns for butanol recovery in a thermochemical biomass to butanol process

Okoli

Adams

2015

Chemical Engineering and Processing: Process Intensification

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Semicontinuous separation of dimethyl ether (DME) produced from biomass

Cited by 26 publications

References 45 publications

Surface hydrophobicity and acidity effect on alumina catalyst in catalytic methanol dehydration reaction

Surface hydrophobicity and acidity effect on alumina catalyst in catalytic methanol dehydration reaction

The Optimal Design of a Distillation System for the Flexible Polygeneration of Dimethyl Ether and Methanol Under Uncertainty

Design of dividing wall columns for butanol recovery in a thermochemical biomass to butanol process

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