Reactive distillation for ETBE production: Optimum design of process units subject to production, economic and geometric constraints

GISELA NOEL DURRUTY; RODRIGUEZ REARTES, SABRINA BELÉN; PATRICIA HOCH

Bahía Blanca

Congreso; IX Congreso Argentino de Ingeniería CAIQ-2017; 2017

AAIQ

The production of ETBE (ethyl tert-butyl ether) is being widely studied in recent years, because of its use as a gasoline additive. ETBE replaced MTBE (methyl tert-butyl ether) since the beginning of this century, due to its lower water solubility, which decreases the contamination of groundwater. ETBE is obtained from reaction of isobutene and ethanol. The implementation of reactive distillation for its production is an interesting alternative to the conventional Hüls process. While the conventional process consist of different units for the reaction, purification and recovery of non-reacted products, the reactive distillation process consists of a single equipment in which all processes are carried out. In this work we formulate a rigorous model for a reactive distillation column for ETBE production. The base case was posed considering the production levels, feed locations and number of reactive stages reported in (Sharifzadeh, 2013) and optimizing the unit configuration in order to maximize the annualized profit subject to constrains in the purity of produced ETBE. Then, we analyze different scenarios for ETBE production by reactive distillation in order to find the best reactive column configuration. Three different sets of optimizations were carried out, the first one consisted on finding the best vapor feed location configuration, the second one, on finding the best liquid feed location and the third one, on finding the best number of reactive stages.