Design and Control of Ethyl Acetate Production Process

Abstract

In this study, the design and control of ethyl acetate production plant has been investigated. The proposed design consists of a continuous-stirred tank reactor and two distillation columns. Ethanol reacts with acetic acid and gives ethyl acetate and water. Plant-wide operability and control of the entire process plant with decentralized controllers is explained by doing both steady state and dynamic simulations. Tray temperature control loop performance is tested for the second distillation column. From the results of dynamic simulation, the proposed control strategy performs very well in rejecting various disturbances while maintaining the ethyl acetate product purity with a settling time of less than 5 h. Heat integrations are performed by using Aspen Energy Analyzer. Air, medium pressure (MP) steam and low pressure (LP) steam cold and hot utilities was proposed to exchange heat with the process streams. The heat exchange was integrated into an existing heat exchanger network (HEN), and the integration was analyzed using pinch analysis. After analysis using retrofit studies an alternative HEN is proposed to save the energy. The new retrofit HEN is achieved by adding two new heat exchangers and the payback period reported is 0.85 years which is less than one year which shows it is a profitable design.