Feasibility evaluation of quinary heterogeneous reactive extractive distillation

This study addresses a feasibility evaluation method for the heterogeneous reactive extractive distillation of azeotropic quinary mixtures based on visualization in composition space. A critical composition region, that is, thermodynamically infeasible region for heterogeneous reactive extractive distillation, is determined by the constraint of reaction and phase equilibria. In addition, operating constraints are imposed on the feasibility evaluation in terms of the upper and lower internal reflux boundaries. Using these two kinds of feasibility constraints, we examine how the ethyl and isopropyl acetate reactive distillation systems, which cannot produce pure products because of four minimum-boiling azeotropes, lead to a full conversion and pure product recovery with the introduction of an external entrainer inducing L-L splits. The pure acetate production in a single reactive extractive distillation column is possible because the composition trajectory approaches the desired region in composition space without being blocked by both the critical composition region and the infeasible region confined by the internal reflux boundaries.