Optimization of a continuous process for the recovery of lactic acid using differential evolution algorithm

Abstract

Purified lactic acid is used for production of biodegradable polymer. Esterification with methanol and subsequent hydrolysis in distillation column using cation exchange resin as catalyst to produce purified lactic acid has obvious advantages. In this paper, we present a theoretical study on optimization of industrial production (1000 t/year) of pure lactic acid using differential evolution (DE), a robust global optimization technique. The objective function is to minimize the overall cost with a view to obtain the optimized values of the decision variables: esterification reaction temperature, number of stages, feed location, reflux ratio, catalyst weight, number of reactive stages and position of reactive stages for hydrolysis.