Reactive distillation (RD) is a process intensification technique that offers major advantages over conventional technologies by enabling the integration of reaction and separation into a single apparatus. This integration introduces and exploits complex interaction between mass transfer, chemical reaction and hydrodynamics within an RD column; however, these complexities can hinder the adoption of RD by industry. Many approaches have been developed by the scientific community to advance understanding and to expedite the initialization of RD design at the conceptual level. This paper critically discusses recent developments in conceptual methods for synthesizing RD processes. This review paper is the first to consider the range of available approaches for assessing the technical feasibility, controllability, economic viability, and sustainability of RD units by taking into account various configurations in which RD is treated as a new unit operation, and as part of process synthesis in a different way of designing processes based on functions. The review also addresses complex configurations, such as advanced RD technologies. Special attention is paid to process modeling and simulation as well as to education. Knowledge gaps to be filled by further research are indicated.@en

Reactive distillation (RD) is a process intensification technology that offers opportunities in the chemical industry. However, designing RD columns remains a demanding task as reaction and separation phenomena occur simultaneously in the column. Moreover, in the early phase of conceptual process design, most of the physical and chemical properties information is unknown. Aiming to deal with that constraint, this paper presents the latest development of a mapping method, for the quick evaluation of the RD applicability. Initially, the approach was introduced in our previous work but limited to quaternary reaction systems. The extended method development performed in this work shows the general suitability of the method for ternary reaction systems, in spite of decreased degree of freedom of the systems. The method validation based on an industrial case study shows that the deviations for predicted number of theoretical stages and reflux ratio are less than 10%. Using only generic cases with fixed representative relative volatilities, chemical equilibrium constant and the Damköhler number, end users of the mapping method can quickly perform the RD applicability screening without doing any extensive rigorous simulations for real systems.@en