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

Semicontinuous reactive distillation was 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. The continuous process used an external CSTR for 2,4-dimethyl-1,3-dioxolane (24DMD) production. Fresh acetaldehyde and propylene glycol were fed to …