MODELLING, SIMULATION AND OPTIMIZATION OF A REACTIVE DISTILLATION PROCESS USING MINITAB AND MATRIX LABORATORY

GIWA, Abdulwahab and GIWA, Saidat Olanipekun (2015) MODELLING, SIMULATION AND OPTIMIZATION OF A REACTIVE DISTILLATION PROCESS USING MINITAB AND MATRIX LABORATORY. ARPN Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 11 (15). ISSN 1819-6608

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Abstract

Reactive distillation is a novel process that combines both che mical reaction and separation in a single piece of equipment. It is normally accomplished inside a column. Actuall y, the process has a lot of benefits, especially for those reactions occurring at temperatures and pressures suitable for the distillation of the resulting components. However, the combination of both reaction and separation in a single unit ha s made the modelling of the process a bit challenging. It has been deemed necessary to employ a mathematical method, with the aid of Minitab, to handle the modelling of this process in an effective manner. Therefore, in this research work, the m odelling knowledge of mathematics has been employed to develop equations for the different phenomena occurring at some specific sections of a reactive distillation column. The developed models were simulated and, further, optimized using M atrix Laboratory in order to obtain the values of the model parameters required to give the desired mole fractions of the product components of the process. The results obtained revealed that the developed models were good represent atives of the top and the bottom sections of the column used because there were good correlations between the measured and the simulated mole fractions as the R-squared values of the top and the bottom section models were estimated to be 9 9.32% and 99.03% respectively. Furthermore, the optimization carried out revealed that multiobjective problem f ormulation was the best way of handling this type of a system because that was the one that gave the desired optimum v alues of the two products from their respective sections of the column

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