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Control of ethylene glycol reactive distillation column
Author(s) -
AlArfaj Muhammad A.,
Luyben William L.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
aiche journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.958
H-Index - 167
eISSN - 1547-5905
pISSN - 0001-1541
DOI - 10.1002/aic.690480424
Subject(s) - ethylene glycol , chemistry , reactive distillation , column (typography) , library science , engineering , polymer science , organic chemistry , distillation , computer science , mechanical engineering , connection (principal bundle)
. Kumar and Daoutidis 1999 studied the control of an eth- ylene glycol reactive distillation column and concluded that an advanced nonlinear inverse-based controller is needed. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that a simple . single-temperature proportional integral PI structure pro- vides effective control. Only a handful of articles have explored the control of re- active distillation columns. A review of recent literature is . given by Al-Arfaj and Luyben 2000 . We have studied a number of reactive distillation columns Al-Arfaj and Luy- . ben, 2002a,b,c and have found that effective control is pro- vided by simple PI control schemes if appropriate manage- ment of feedstreams and product purities is provided. The chemistry in the ethylene glycol process is the irre- versible reaction of ethylene oxide with water to form ethy- lene glycol. There is a second consecutive reaction in which ethylene oxide reacts with ethylene glycol to form di-ethylene glycol. We use the kinetics given by Kumar and Daoutidis .1999 . The steady-state design and the dynamic simulations use the commercial simulators Aspen Plus 10.2 and Aspen Dynamics 10.2. This study demonstrates the value of dynamic simulation in the analysis of alternative control schemes for complex unit operations.