Design and control of cyclohexanol reactive-distillation process with alternative decanter configurations

Cyclohexanol is widely used in industry as a precursor for the synthesis of intermediates of Nylon. In this paper, design and control of reactive-distillation process for the production of cyclohexanol have been studied. The total annual costs of two alternative decanter configurations are comparable. However, one configuration gives much better operability than the others in the face of feed disturbances. To achieve wider operability, proper selection of the overall control strategy is critically important. Rigorous dynamic simulations will be used to illustrate the findings.