Reactive Distillation Design and Control

Reactive distillation has economical and environmental advantages

Reactive distillation is a breakthrough process innovation with numerous applications in the petroleum and chemical industries. In systems with the appropriate chemistry and vapor–liquid phase equilibrium, it combines the reaction and separation operations, which reduces energy and capital costs and environmental impact. After an overview of the fundamentals, limitations, and scope of reactive distillation, Reactive Distillation Design and Control:

• Uses rigorous models for steady-state design and dynamic analysis of different types of reactive distillation columns
• Quantitatively compares the economics of reactive distillation columns with conventional multi-unit processes
• Goes beyond traditional steady-state design that considers primarily the capital investment and energy costs when analyzing the control structure and the dynamic robustness of disturbances
• Discusses how to maximize the economic and environmental benefits of reactive distillation technology

Written by authors who have a background in design and control with an emphasis on practical engineering solutions to real industrial problems, this guide forgoes intricate, complicated mathematics and complex methods of analysis and gets down to business. It's an accessible reference for chemical, process, and petroleum engineers and undergraduate and graduate students in chemical engineering.

WILLIAM L. LUYBEN, PHD, is Professor of Chemical Engineering at Lehigh University. In addition to forty years of teaching, Dr. Luyben spent nine years as an engineer with Exxon and DuPont. He has written nine books and more than 200 papers. He was the 2004 recipient of the Computing Practice Award from the CAST Division of the AIChE and was elected in 2005 to the Process Automation Hall of Fame.

CHENG-CHING YU, PHD, has spent sixteen years as a Professor at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology and four years at National Taiwan University. He has published over 100 technical papers in the areas of plant-wide process control, reactive distillation, control of microelectronic processes, and modeling of fuel cell systems.