A new approach to design heat-integrated reactive distillation process: Part 1. Application to an ideal indirect neat process case

This paper introduces a novel approach to optimizing reactive distillation (RD) process before heat-integration (HI) to achieve greater energy savings in the subsequent heat-integrated configuration. While conventional approaches prioritize minimizing "overall energy consumption" before implementing HI, this study proposes minimizing the energy consumption of the RD column (RDC) first prior to HI to achieve more significant energy savings. Heat-integrated neat design RD and thermally coupled reactive distillation (TCRD) were investigated in this study. By comparing two scenarios, i.e., First scenario; minimizing overall energy consumption and Second scenario; minimizing the energy consumption of the RDC before HI, our findings demonstrated that the latter approach consistently achieves higher energy savings, ranging from 31.64% to 46.08% relative to the base case, following HI. Additionally, we observed that the hybrid heat-integrated configuration in our study has a higher energy consumption than the double-effect configuration. This was attributed to their shared dependence on RDC after HI. Altogether, our findings challenge conventional practices and offer an alternative pathway to enhance energy efficiency in industrial processes.