The dynamic behavior for a high-purity/high-conversion reactive distillation is investigated. The impact of disturbance magnitudes and directions on both open loop and closed loop stability of the system is studied. Excess of less volatile reactant in two-reactant-two-product generic reactive distillation is found to enhance open loop stability, but decreases the products purity. However, exces...

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) can accurately identify and learn the potential relationship between input output, have self-learning capabilities high fault tolerance, which be used to predict or optimize performance of complex systems. Reactive distillation integrates reaction rectification into one device, so that two processes occur at same time place, but it also produces highly nonlinear...

Production of ethyl dodecanoate (biodiesel) using lauric acid and methanol with a solid acid catalyst of sulfated zirconia is studied by using two distillation sequences. In the first sequence, the methanol recovery column follows the reactive distillation column. In the second sequence, the reactive distillation and methanol recovery columns are thermally coupled. Thermally coupled distillatio...

In this study, a short method for the design of reactive distillation is presented. The method is based on distillation lines and tray-by-tray calculations, and a new strategy is suggested to locate the reflux ratio, the number of stages, and feed tray. The material balances are solved from the outside (top and bottom) to the inside of the distillation column (feed), to ensure that the product ...

Methyl propionate, also known as methyl propanoate, is a clear colourless liquid with a characteristic odour (fruity smell and taste). In this study, the formation of methyl propionate through the esterification of propionic acid and methanol was investigated in the reactive distillation system using a conventional (CBD), single feed (SF-SBD), and double feed semi-batch distillation (DF-SBD) co...