MODELLING AND SIMULATION OF REACTIVE DIVIDED WALL DISTILLATION COLUMN

Abstract

Economic and environmental reasons• have led to process intensification in the process industries. Reactive distillation is the most prominent example. The integration of further separation steps with a. reactive distillation column leads to a highly integrated process: a reactive dividing wall column. Within one apparatus, more than two products can be obtained and the capital cost can, be reduced drastically. Dimethyl ether (DME) is. of great industrial interest due to its use as clean fuel for diesel engines or in combustion cells, as a precursor to other organic compounds, . as well as a green aerosol propellant that can effectively replace chloro-fluoro-carbons._ Conventionally, high purity DME is synthesized by dehydration of methanol produced from syngas, in a process involving a catalytic fixed-bed reactor and a direct sequence of two distillation columns The key problem of this classic process is the high investments costs for several units that require a large overall plant footprint, as well as the associated high energy requirements. To solve these problems, we propose in this work an innovative DME process based on a' reactive dividing-wall column (R-DWC) that effectively integrates in one shell a reactive distillation (RD) unit with the DWC technology. The results clearly demonstrate that the R-DWC process has superior performances as compared to the conventional or RD process: significant energy savings of 12-58%, up to 60% reduced CO2 emissions, as well as up to 30% lower capital investment costs.