Simulación de un sistema de producción de etilbenceno con reacciones basadas en zeolita de fase líquida y separación mediante una columna de pared divisoria (DWC)

Abstract

The main objective of the present work was the simulation of an ethylbenzene production system with reactions based on liquid phase zeolite through the relevant design equations and the kinetics of the reactions, for its subsequent separation by means of a dividing-wall column (DWC) applying the DWSIM software, where the operation variables were obtained from the scientific article "Design and analysis of an ethyl benzene production process using conventional distillation columns and dividing-wall column for multiple objectives". To perform the simulation of the process, the decision was made to simulate independently each alkylation, transalkylation and distillation process, then for its general representation, flow sheet blocks of the simulation program were used to form the general balance of ethyl benzene production. By means of this methodology the following results were obtained for each of the processes, where an output in mole fraction of the ethylbenzene product of 0.889325 was obtained in the distillation, an output in mole fraction of EB of 0.233234 in the alkylation and an output in mole fraction of EB of 0.368897 in the transalkylation as the main line of study. It was concluded that the DWSIM program fulfills its function by obtaining as first important point an efficiency of 88.95% in the distillation, 97.71% in the alkylation and 98.95% in the transalkylation and secondly by performing completely the simulation of the scientific article and being able to compare its final values both with the conventional distillation system and with the distillation system applying a dividing wall column (DWC). It was proposed due to the efficiency of the DWSIM software to use aspen HYSYS for these complex processes or to get more information from complex distillation columns to use this open source software.