Equipment Design: Reactive Distillation Column Design

The design of reactive distillation systems is considerably more complex than that of conventional reactors and distillation columns. It includes several steps (Malone and Doherty, 2000): feasibility analysis, conceptual design, equipment selection and design, operability and control studies. These steps can be corresponded to the stages of the process design model presented in this work — ABstract design (feasibility analysis), Conceptual design, DEtailed design (equipment selection and design) and Final design (operability and control studies). The methodology of case-based design support has been applied to the DE phase of the design of a reactive distillation column.