A PHENOMENA BASED DESIGN APPROACH TO REACTIVE DISTILLATION

Major economic breakthroughs in chemical processes may demand the abil ity to extend process design beyond the domain of traditional unit ope rations. Reactive distillation belongs to the class of multifunctional units where a standard, configurative approach to design has so far h ad limited success when it comes to the creation of systematic methods for generation and the comparison of alternatives. This paper present s an analytic framework for reactive distillation systems based on the notion of phenomena vectors. Finally, it is demonstrated how this fra mework may be applied in the analysis of various design alternatives f or systems which exhibit complex interactions between reaction and sep aration, using MTBE production as an example.