Design and Control of Diphenyl Carbonate Reactive Distillation Process with Thermally Coupled and Heat-Integrated Stages Configuration

Abstract It has been extensively proven that thermally coupled distillation columns can effectively use less energy than their conventional counterparts. Similarly, the extension to reactive systems has also shown that thermally coupled reactive distillation columns can reduce the energy consumption in comparison with their conventional reactive distillation counterparts. This work aims to show that by realizing heat integration between thermally coupled columns at different pressure, further energy savings can be attained. The diphenyl carbonate production process has been taken up to show that there is a synergistic effect when thermally coupling and heat integration are combined in the same distillation sequence. The results showed that the proposed system could attain 47% energy savings in comparison with conventional a reactive distillation sequence while keeping good rejection of throughput and feed composition disturbances.