Design and Control of Thermally Coupled Reactive Distillation Sequence for Biodiesel Production

Decreasing petroleum reserves and growing alternative fuels requirements have promoted the study of biodiesel production. In this work, two thermally coupled reactive distillation designs for biodiesel production were investigated, and the sensitivity analysis was conducted to obtain the appropriate design values. The thermodynamic analysis and economics evaluation were performed to estimate the superiority of the thermally coupled designs over the base case. The proposed biodiesel production processes were simulated using the simulator Aspen Plus, and calculation results show that the exergy loss and economic cost in the two thermally coupled designs can be greatly reduced. It is found that the thermally coupled side-stripper reactive distillation design provides more economic benefits than the side-rectifier one. The dynamic performance of the thermally coupled side-stripper design was investigated and the results showed that the proposed control structure could effectively handle large feed disturbances.