Dynamic controllability strategy of reactive-extractive dividing wall column for the separation of water-containing ternary azeotropic mixture

The reactive-extractive dividing wall column (REDWC), which combines conventional reactive distillation, extractive distillation, and dividing wall column, is a highly integrated process with a compact physical space and strong interrelations between variables. It is challenging to design robust control strategies for the REDWC process. However, there are no investigations reported on the control of REDWC. In this study, through analyzing open-loop controllability indicators of the steady-state process, the basic control structure (CS1) is constructed. Subsequently, four proportional-integral control schemes are further established on the CS1: the proportional control structure (CS2), the internal composition control structure (CS3), the feedforward control structure (CS4), and the three-point temperature control structure (CS5) with feedforward loops. The dynamic performance tests are conducted with ± 10 % feed flow rate and ± 10 % feed composition disturbances. The qualitative research demonstrates that the CS5 offers the best dynamic performance in terms of settling time, steady-state deviations, and overshoots without the use of expensive composition controllers. With the integral absolute error (IAE) as an evaluation criterion, it is quantitatively demonstrated that the CS5 has the best robustness and should be the preferred control scheme. Another key finding shows that the vapor split ratio and the stoichiometric ratio of the reactants are two crucial degrees of freedom to guarantee product quality in the REDWC. The major contributions of this work are to provide a meaningful reference for the control of the REDWC and even more complicated distillation.