Semicontinuous reactive distillation for specialty chemicals production: Economic comparison with batch and continuous processing

Semicontinuous reactive distillation (SRD) has been introduced as a novel means of integrating reaction and separation operations using a forced-cyclic strategy. Rigorous simulations of equivalent batch, continuous, and semicontinuous designs were analyzed and compared over a range of production capacities. In the case study examined, the SRD design requires significantly less capital costs than both batch and continuous strategies, and requires about the same amount of manufacturing costs as batch. As a result, the SRD strategy is the economically optimal choice for a wide range of intermediate production rates.