抄録
A reactive distillation (RD) for the production of ethyl acetate (EtAc) from acetic acid (HAc) and ethanol (EtOH) using sulfuric acid as homogeneous catalyst is presented. To meet the industrial specification of HAc(≤0.01 wt%) and EtOH (≤0.2 wt%) in the product stream, a complete esterification process including a RD column with an overhead decanter and a stripping column are synthesized and studied by using the Aspen Plus® simulator. In a basic case, (Tang et al., 2003) perfect Murphree tray efficiency was assumed. To be more practical, the effect of the Murphree tray efficiency is considered in this study. Because of the effects of the non-ideality in Murphree tray efficiency, the heat duty of stripper and the organic reflux flow of RD column are adjusted to meet EtOH and HAc requirements in the product stream, respectively. It was found, output multiplicity occurred while this organic reflux flow rate is between 41 to 45 moles/sec and the Murphree tray efficiency is lower than 70%. As a result, the Murphree tray efficiency becomes a bifurcation parameter. As the tray efficiency is even lower, the existence of multiple steady-states is getting more obvious.
