Simulation Research Of Inter-integration Reactive Distillation With Vapor Permeation For Ethyl Levulinate Production

Among downstream products of levulinic acid,ethyl levulinate（EL）is considered as one of the most important value-added energy chemicals in the 21st century.At present,EL can be produced through the esterification of levulinic acid（LA）and ethanol（Et OH）in industry.However,the system cannot be produced by single reactive distillation（RD）column through the existing process as the product water will form azeotrope with the reactant Et OH,which makes the cost of production and price of EL remain high.The reactive-vapor permeation-distillation（R-VP-D）hybrid configuration is a newly designed process-integration concept proposed for the production of EL by esterification of Et OH and LA in this paper.To start with,the R-VP-D configuration,which has been verified by experiment results,is modeled in Aspen Plus V8.4 using the two-dimensional VP model built in ACM^?.Besides,the inserting position of single VP module is found by contrast trials,where both the conversion rate and purity of product can reach the industrial production standards（LA conversion rate:99.43%,EL bottom field:99.5%）.Furthermore,situation of inserting VP modules into two different positions is also researched.As a result,the proposed R-VP-D configuration can save 21.6%TAC and31.4%total duty compared to the RD_{Et OH}-only configuration,and save 13.5%TAC and 21.5%total duty compared to the RD-VP hybrid configuration.Finally,the global optimization strategy of R-VP-D process is proposed and applied to improve the optimized R-VP-D configuration,and the TAC of the process is further reduced by 0.7%.The result shows the advantage of proposed R-VP-D process for decreasing the cost and increasing the energy efficiency of RD process for EL production.