Designing reactive distillation processes with improved efficiency

Abstract

In this dissertation a life-span inspired perspective is taken on the conceptual design of grassroots reactive distillation processes. Attention was paid to the economic performance of the process and to potential losses of valuable resources over the process life span. The research was cast in a set of goal-oriented engineering and specific scientific design questions. The scientific novelty of this work is based around four key aspects of reactive distillation process design: (i) the formulation of an extended design problem in reactive distillation achieved by refreshing it in the wider context of process development and engineering and in a more relevant way regarding sustainability; (ii) the definition of an integrated design methodology achieved by analyzing current design methodologies and bridging the gaps between them; while we suggest this methodology as a way to beat the design complexity by decomposition, it requires the mastery of many tools and many concepts; (iii) the improvement of design tools achieved by exploring and extending current techniques and systematically applying them to the reactive distillation case; (iv) the definition of performance criteria that can be used to account for the process performance from a life-span inspired perspective, as well as applications of them.