Comparison of dynamic performances for heat integrated reactive distillation considering safety

Abstract The heat integrated reactive distillation is beneficial on energy saving and economy compared with conventional reactive distillation. However, the dynamic controllability is unfavorable due to the complexities of system. In this paper, five different control structures for the isopropyl acetate synthesis are presented as considering both product purities and safety. The integral of absolute error (IAE) and process stream index (PSI) are used to quantify the dynamic performances. The result shows that four enhanced control schemes can achieve better dynamic performances compared with the basic control structure. Based on the four improved control structures, the control structure with temperature difference controller shows the best performance, as involving the overshoot, recovery time, IAE, and PSI, since it improves the tuning stability and adjusts the temperature difference of exchange heat process between the high-pressure column and the low-pressure column.