Efficiency assessment of chemical processes: Reactor and separation.

Abstract

Chemical sector is one of the big sectors in the world. The shortage of raw materials, the importance in the sustainability, as the environmental requirements, and the increased of competition make the necessity of investigation and application of more efficient and cost-effective processes (Recker et al, 2015). One tool in the search or optimization of process is the use of simulators, which allow us obtaining results quickly and easily in complex processes using simplified models, allowed us to do changes or variations in same process to compare with each other. However, rigorous simulations requires a great effort and therefore it is not suitable for process screening. Due to the shortage of methods that study the efficiency of the process at early process design stages, in this work has been developed a short cut method that allows obtaining the efficiency of the alternative process schemes considering reactor and separation jointly. This method is based on application of DSE (Distillation Sequence Efficiency), to which is added a correction factor to take into consideration the reactor. ETBE (Ethyl Tert-Butyl Ether) production process is used as case study. Analyzing the different alternatives of design of the chosen alternative, trough simulations in AspenPlus®, is determined the feasibility of each of the alternatives suggested. The DSE with the correction factors for the calculation of the efficiency is implemented using FORTRAN® in AspenPlus®.