Design and control of homogeneous and heterogeneous reactive distillation for ethyl acetate process

This paper compares conceptual design and control of two reactive distillation (RD) processes for the production of ethyl acetate (EtAc) using homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts. The homogeneous catalytic RD process has higher capital cost but less energy cost and less concern about the catalyst installation and frequent replacement. The heterogeneous catalytic process has faster reactions in both forward and reverse directions than those of the homogeneous one. Thus, it needs less reactive hold-up and less number of trays to achieve the product specifications. The column composition profiles are with quite different form for these two cases. As for the control of these two catalytic RD processes, they also have quite different dynamic behaviours. From our study, heterogeneous catalytic process has faster closed-loop response and lower steady-state offset in final product purity in the face of throughput and feed composition disturbances than the homogeneous ones.