A mapping method for quick assessment of reactive distillation applicability to ternary reaction systems

Reactive distillation (RD) is a process intensification technology that offers opportunities in the chemical industry. However, designing RD columns remains a demanding task as reaction and separation phenomena occur simultaneously in the column. Moreover, in the early phase of conceptual process design, most of the physical and chemical properties information is unknown. Aiming to deal with that constraint, this paper presents the latest development of a mapping method, for the quick evaluation of the RD applicability. Initially, the approach was introduced in our previous work but limited to quaternary reaction systems. The extended method development performed in this work shows the general suitability of the method for ternary reaction systems, in spite of decreased degree of freedom of the systems. The method validation based on an industrial case study shows that the deviations for predicted number of theoretical stages and reflux ratio are less than 10%. Using only generic cases with fixed representative relative volatilities, chemical equilibrium constant and the Damköhler number, end users of the mapping method can quickly perform the RD applicability screening without doing any extensive rigorous simulations for real systems.