The Production of Butyl Acetate and Methanol via Reactive and Extractive Distillation. II. Process Modeling, Dynamic Simulation, and Control Strategy

A new process to exploit a methanol + methyl acetate mixture by reactive and extractive distillation with n -butanol using o -xylene as the entrainer has been developed. The aim of this work is to synthesize, design, and study the dynamic behavior for the azeotropic separation, the reactive and extractive distillation unit, and the solvent recovery system. The process was modeled using rate-based and equilibrium-stage approaches with the kinetic expression developed for the transesterification reaction and reported in part I of this paper ( Ind. Eng. Chem. Res . 2002, 41, 6663). High-purity methanol and butyl acetate were obtained as products, and yields approaching 100% of n -butanol were achieved. A parametric study elucidated the effects of the key operating variables. As expected, the process bottleneck is the reactive and extractive distillation unit and, in particular, the control strategy for achieving the coupled targets. A preliminary economic study reveals that the process has no profitability.