Visualization of stage calculations in quaternary reactive distillation with multiple reactions

When multiple reactions of quaternary mixtures take place in a reactive distillation column, the behavior of composition trajectory is analyzed by a visual-aided method. By adding additional vectors of multiple reactions and visualizing them in composition space, the composition of each component and extent of each reaction on an arbitrary stage can be easily estimated in terms of the composition trajectory and reaction cascade difference points. Moreover, for a given operating conditions, the number of total stages and position of optimum reaction zone can be determined by the visual-aided method. In this study, ethylene glycol synthesis with a side reaction is taken as an example and analyzed by the proposed graphical method. Through this method, the quaternary reactive distillation with multiple reactions can be analyzed without numerous experiments and simulations.