The Design and Feasibility of Reactive and Azeotropic Distillation Sequences

Reactive distillation integrates reaction and distillation in the same physical shell. Due to this integration traditional hierarchical design methods are often not suitable for reactive distillation. Design methods have progressed for reactive distillation; however, they are often limited to single columns or three or four component systems. As design methods have progressed for reactive distillation so has industrial adoption. Yet, column sequence synthesis methods for reactive distillation are still limited.;This thesis develops reactive distillation and extractive distillation design methods suitable for column sequencing. The effect of reaction distribution is analyzed on reactive column profiles. From this analysis existing feasibility methods are shown not to capture all potential splits when reactive and extractive distillation is considered. A new feasibility method is developed that is able to determine an extended set of splits.;Using these splits, a superstructure is formulated for the column sequencing problem. This superstructure is modeled as a linear generalized disjunctive program. A modified branch and cut program is utilized to generate solutions. This design method is used to produce multiple column sequences that are suitable for further design.