Development of Dynamic Models for a Reactive Packed Distillation Column

This work has been carried out to develop dynamic models for a reactive packed distillationcolumn using the production of ethyl acetate as the case study. The experimental setup for theproduction of ethyl acetate was a pilot scale packed column divided into condenser, rectification,acetic acid feed, reaction, ethanol feed, stripping and reboiler sections. The reaction section wasfilled with Amberlyst 15 catalyst while the rectification and the stripping sections were both filledraschig rings. The theoretical models for each of the sections of the column were developed fromfirst principles and solved with the aid of MATLAB R2011a. Comparisons were made between theexperimental and theoretical results by calculating the percentage residuals for the top andbottom segment temperatures of the column. The results obtained showed that there were goodagreements between the experimental and theoretical top and bottom segment temperaturesbecause the calculated percentage residuals were small. Therefore, the developed dynamicmodels can be used to represent the reactive packed distillation column.