Self-heat recuperative dividing wall column for enhancing the energy efficiency of the reactive distillation process in the formic acid production process

This paper proposes a novel self-heat recuperative dividing wall column configuration to enhance energy efficiency of a reactive distillation process in the formic acid production process. A patented formic acid production process as a base case was optimized for further evaluation. Both external heat integration and thermal coupling were examined by placing a side-reboiler onto the reactive distillation column and by configuring the reactive distillation column to a top dividing wall column. A novel self-heat recuperative dividing wall column configuration was finally proposed to take synergistic advantage of the thermally-coupled and heat-integrated structures. The proposed configuration requires no compressor and provides preferable conditions for the self-heat recuperation by avoiding the remixing effect and reducing the energy requirements. The proposed self-heat recuperative dividing wall column configuration can also be applied to other similar distillation processes to improve the energy efficiency.