Ruiz-Mercado, Gerardo J.

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Design and analysis in modelling reactive separation processes
(2008) Ruiz-Mercado, Gerardo J.; Sridhar, Lakshmi; College of Engineering; Benítez, Jaime; Villafañe, Gilberto; Saliceti, Lorenzo; Department of Chemical Engineering; Orellana, Lynette
This work presents the existence of multiple steady states in equilibrium multistage reactive distillation for methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) synthesis. The Rachford-Rice procedure is extended to reactive systems where a continuation analysis was applied using the Damköhler number for an isothermal reactive flash process involving both MTBE and tertiary amyl methyl ether (TAME) mixtures exhibiting Hopf bifurcations. The Extension of this analysis to nonequilibrium models shows the existence of limit points in the case of the TAME mixture and isolas with intersecting branches in the case of the MTBE mixture. New expressions to calculate the nonequilibrium residue composition maps for reactive separation processes incorporating mass transfer effects and design aspects were derived. For MTBE synthesis it was demonstrated that reactive saddle-point azeotrope calculated by equilibrium and nonequilibrium approaches are not the same and for TAME synthesis the nonequilibrium and equilibrium reactive composition curve maps in the limit of reaction equilibrium were obtained.