Design and control of conventional and reactive distillation processes for the production of butyl acetate

Jimenez and Costa-Lopez (Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2002, 41, 6735) recently discussed a reactive distillation process for the production of butyl acetate in which an extractive agent is used. Their process requires four distillation columns. No details of their plantwide control structure are given. This paper presents a quantitative comparison of two alternative processes for the production of butyl acetate in which no extractive agent is employed. The first is a conventional reactor/separation process with a reactor, three distillation columns, and two recycles. The second uses a reactive distillation column with two other conventional columns and two recycles. Each process is economically optimized, and the reactive distillation process has a 20% lower total annual cost. Plantwide control structures are developed for each process, and their effectiveness in the face of very large disturbances is demonstrated by dynamic simulation.