Modeling and Simulation of Dimethyl Ether Production from Methanol Dehydration by Reactive Distillation

In recent years, chemical industries have shown increasing interest in the development of reactive distillation process for production of dimethyl ether (DME). Reactive distillation has several advantages, i.e., high reaction yield and selectivity, overcoming thermodynamic restrictions and reduction in energy over the traditional two step process, reaction and distillation. In this work, attempts were made to develop and simulate an equilibrium dynamic model for multicomponent catalytic distillation for dehydration of methanol to produce dimethyl ether. A combination of material balance, phase equilibrium, summation equations and enthalpy balance were used to model equilibrium stages and a Langmuir- Hinshelwood/Hougen-Watson (LHHW) mechanism was used to calculate the rate of DME production. To simulate the process, MATLAB software, version (7.8.0) under operating system of windows Xp was used. Variation of concentrations with time for each component was obtained along the column and as expected high purity DME was obtained from the top of the column.

Keywords:

Modeling , Simulation , Reactive Distillation , Dimethyl Ether , Equilibrium Dynamic Model