Abstract:
This thesis aimed to propose a control structure design of the sodium methoxide production process. The sodium methoxide process consisted of a reactive distillation column which is used for reacting and separating products. Also, a conventional distillation column was employed for separating and recycling unused reactant back into the process for increasing efficiency of the production process.
The research methodology started with studying the sodium methoxide production process designed by Siriporn et.al. (2017) as a base case process. The base case process was modified to achieve more production efficiency by designing a new operational process, changing number of both distillation column stages and designing control structure for the modified process. This research used the commercial software, Aspen Plus and Aspen Dynamic, to create a simulation in a steady state and a dynamic mode, respectively.
The simulation results show that changing feed stream temperature, changing the number of reactive distillation stages and changing the number of conventional distillation stages could reduce the operating cost of the overall process, which increased the efficiency of production process and the proposed control structure and complied with the referred research papers.