RD-Toolbox: A Computer Aided Toolbox for Integrated Design and Control of Reactive Distillation Processes

Control and operation of intensified processes are inherently difficult due to a reduced region of controllability, which originates from a high degree of interaction among the design-control parameters. As a result, a design with feasible steady state operation may be dynamically inoperable due to the inability to ensure stability in the open-loop or closed-loop. To address these issues, an integrated design-control toolbox, which is tailor-made for reactive distillation (RD) processes, is proposed in this paper. Given a set of design-control parameters, this RD-Toolbox links in-house tools to required external tools and guides the user to set up steady state and dynamic simulations and perform controllability analysis. To demonstrate the range of functionalities of the RD-Toolbox, two case studies (ethyl tert-butyl ether (ETBE) and ethyl acetate production) are presented. For the ETBE case study, the design-control parameters are obtained through two integrated design-control methods, namely the superstructure optimization method and the driving force-based method. In terms of controllability, both designs for the ETBE system could efficiently reject feed disturbances. For the ethyl acetate case, the suggested set of design-control parameters corresponding to the maximum driving force-based design could exhibit satisfactory control performance. The results illustrate the advantages of using the RD-Toolbox for fast, reliable, and efficient solution and analysis of RD processes.