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Language: English

Conflict of Interest: In relation to this article, we declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Publication history: Received December 24, 2007
Accepted April 21, 2008

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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The use of dilute acetic acid for butyl acetate production in a reactive distillation: Simulation and control studies

Amornchai Arpornwichanop^† Chantarawadee Wiwittanaporn Suthida Authayanun Suttichai Assabumrungrat¹

Control and Systems Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand ¹Center of Excellence in Catalysis and Catalytic Reaction Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering,Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand, Korea

Amornchai.A@chula.ac.th

Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering, November 2008, 25(6), 1252-1266(15), 10.1007/s11814-008-0207-y

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Abstract

The recovery of dilute acetic acid, which is widely found as a by-product in many chemical and petrochemical industries, becomes an important issue due to economic and environmental awareness. In general, separation of acetic acid in aqueous solution by conventional distillation columns is difficult, requiring a column with many stages and high energy consumption. As a result, the primary concern of the present study is the application of reactive distillation as a potential alternative method to recover dilute acetic acid. The direct use of dilute acetic acid as reactant for esterification with butanol to produce butyl acetate in the reactive distillation is investigated. Simulation studies are performed in order to investigate effect of the concentration of dilute acetic acid and key process parameters on the performance of the reactive distillation in terms of acetic acid conversion and butyl acetate production. In addition, three alternative control strategies are studied for the closed loop control of the reactive distillation. The control objective_x000D_ is to maintain the butyl acetate in a bottom product stream at the desired purity of 99.5 wt%.

Keywords

Dilute Acetic Acid Reactive Distillation Butyl Acetate Simulation Control

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