Design and Control of the Side Reactor Configuration for Production of Ethyl Acetate

Despite some potential advantages of reactive distillation (RD), reactive distillation may suffer from maintenance/design problems such as catalyst deactivation/replacement and equipment design. In this work, an alternative design, a side reactor configuration, is sought and the process of interest is production of ethyl acetate via esterification. The reactive distillation study by Tang et al. (2005) reveals that almost 90% conversion takes place in the column base of the RD. This naturally suggests a coupled reactor/distillation configuration where all of the catalyst is packed in the bottoms base, denoted as single-reactive tray reactive distillation (RD-SRT). This mitigates the maintenance problem associated with conventional RD. However, simulation results show that, with the same amount of catalyst loading, the SRT configuration cannot achieve the same performance as the RD (∼93% conversion). Another alternative is adding external reactors to the SRT, and this is termed the side reactor configuratio...