AN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN CONTROL STUDY FOR THE VINYL-ACETATE MONOMER PROCESS/

This work presents design details of an industrial process for the man ufacture of vinyl acetate monomer. Our purpose is to offer a realistic example that is uniquely suited for academic researchers pursuing sim ulation, design, and control studies. The vinyl acetate process has co mmon, real chemical components. It contains many standard unit operati ons in a realistic flowsheet. And it illustrates the types of systems of industrial research interest in the areas of process design, optimi zation, simulation, and control. Vapor-phase reactions convert ethylen e, oxygen, and acetic acid into vinyl acetate with water and carbon di oxide as byproducts. The process contains a packed tubular reactor, a feed-effluent heat exchanger, an absorber, a vaporizer, an azeotropic distillation column with decanter, and both gas and liquid recycle str eams. All physical property, kinetic, and flowsheet data have been com piled from sources in the open literature. We detail the flowsheet inf ormation required to construct rigorous steady state and dynamic mathe matical models of the process and present the process control requirem ents and objectives. Finally, we briefly describe the rigorous nonline ar dynamic simulation we have constructed for this process using TMODS , DuPont's in-house dynamic simulator. Models of this process have als o been developed by Aspen Technology and Hyprotech in their commercial simulators and are available directly from the vendors. (C) 1998 Else vier Science Ltd; All rights reserved.