Study on a novel reactive internally heat integrated distillation process for the synthesis of ethyl acetate and its column configuration

• The RHIDiC process was proposed for producing EA ethyl acetate。 • S-RHIDiC, UA-RHIDiC and LA-RHIDiC processes were studied. • All processes were optimized with total annual cost (TAC) as the economic indicator. • S-RHIDiC process had advantage over other processes. The production of ethyl acetate (EA) by reactive distillation (RD) has the disadvantage of high energy consumption. In order to solve this problem, the application of reactive internal heat integrated distillation was explored on the basis of RD process, and energy saving was further realized. The influence of different configurations of reactive internally heat integrated distillation column (RHIDiC) on the process were also studied. In this study, the symmetrical reaction internal heat integrated distillation column (S-RHIDiC), the upper aligned reaction internal heat integrated distillation column (UA-RHIDiC) and the lower aligned reaction internal heat integrated distillation column (LA-RHIDiC) were compared with RD in economic benefits, environmental protection, energy saving performance, and thermodynamic efficiency. In addition, all processes were optimized with TAC as the economic indicator. The results showed that S-RHIDiC process has the optimal economic benefits, environmental performance, energy consumption and thermodynamic efficiency. Compared with RD, the total annual cost (TAC) of S-RHIDiC was reduced by 32.56%, CO 2 emissions were reduced by 52.79%, the TEC was reduced by 29.37%. The thermodynamic efficiency of RD, S-RHIDiC, UA-RHIDiC and LA-RHIDiC processes were 6.71%, 9.12%, 6.75% and 6.8%, respectively.