Modeling, Simulation and Experimental Investigation of a Reactive Hybrid Process for the Production of Dimethyl Carbonate

Process intensification has been identified as a main tool to achieve higher efficiencies leading to a more sustainable production. Especially hybrid as well as reactive separations allow for increased separation efficiency at the same time reducing the energy consumption. Integrating reactive and hybrid separations within one process may create even larger positive synergy effects. However, by this integration several process configurations exist and the identification of the best process operation remains unsolved. Hence, a process analysis tool has been developed to identify the most promising intensified process configuration based on simple calculations and secondly, to identify the influence of the process parameters on the target variables. To underline the potential of this tool, the equilibrium-limited transesterification of propylene carbonate forming dimethyl carbonate is investigated. For this system, a reactive hybrid process integrating reactive distillation and vapor permeation is designed in this work.