Novel heat pump reactive distillation and dividing-wall column reactive distillation processes for synthesizing isopropyl acetate to save TAC and reduce CO2 emissions

ABSTRACT Focusing primarily on the issue of high energy consumption in isopropyl acetate (IPAC) production, a heat pump reactive distillation (RD-HP) process and a dividing-wall column reactive distillation (RD-DWC) process were proposed. Chemical software Aspen Plus (version 10) was used to investigate the steady state simulations. In this work, RD-HP and RD-DWC processes were compared with conventional reactive distillation (CRD) in energy saving, economic, and environmental performance. In addition, TAC was used as the objective function, and the sequential iterative procedure was proposed for the design of three processes, and the optimal parameters were obtained. The results manifested that the IPAC product of three processes all reached the purity index (mole fraction 98.20%). Compared with CRD, the TAC of RD-HP and RD-DWC were reduced by 13.46% and 21.31%, CO2 emissions were reduced by 13.25% and 20.17%, respectively. The thermodynamic efficiency of three processes are 7.69%, 9.02%, and 10.57%, respectively.