Combining distillation and heterogeneous catalytic reactors

Abstract

The hardware design of reactive distillation (RD) columns pose severe challenges with respect to the choice and design of the hardware; the requirements of reaction (i.e. high liquid or catalyst holdup) are not in consonance with the requirement of separation (high interfacial area). In this paper we examine an alternative to the RD concept, namely a distillation column networked with a single side (external) reactor, which we call the SR concept. For the case study of tertiary-amyl ether (TAME) production by reaction of isoamylene (IA) with methanol, we show that employing the SR concept it is possible to meet the design targets of IA conversion, TAME purity in bottom product and TAME impurity in top product using just one side reactor. From detailed hardware designs, we see that the RD column is significantly taller than the distillation column in the SR configuration; this is due to the placement of the catalyst load with in the RD column. We conclude that the SR concept will be competitive with the RD column configuration provided the IA conversion targets are not too stringent.