Steady State Operability Characteristics of an Adiabatic Fixed-Bed Reactor for Methanol Dehydration

Operability analysis as one of the most important bridges between process design and process control helps the process designer to investigate the control issues quite early in the design stage. Recently, Vinson and Georgakis suggested a steady state geometrical operability index as a quantitative measure for assessment of process operability. In this paper, DME fixed-bed reactor is heterogeneously modeled based on mass and energy conservation law at steady state condition. To verify the accuracy of the model, simulation results of the conventional reactor is compared with the available industrial plant data. It is observed that there is a good agreement between the simulation result and the plant data. Then, the steady state operability characteristics of DME reactor have been analyzed by using the framework of Vinson and Georgakis. This paper demonstrates the utility of the approach to industrial chemical reactors. By measuring the operability characteristics of the reactor, the input and output operability index of the process is calculated equal to 43.31% and 57.58% respectively. The results showed the low process ability for creation of desired output by available input.