Edreder E., Mujtaba I., Emtir M., 2012, Simulation of Middle Vessel Batch Reactive Distillation Column: Application to Hydrolysis of Methyl Lactate, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 29, 595-600.
The middle vessel column (MVC) is a combination of a batch rectifier (conventional column) and a batch stripper (inverted column). Therefore it is possible to obtain a light and a heavy fraction simultaneously from the top and the bottom of the column while an intermediate fraction may also be recovered in the middle vessel. Several researchers in the past have proposed the esterification of lactic acid (impure) with alcohol to obtain lactate ester which is then separated by distillation. To the best of our knowledge, simulation of middle vessel batch reactive distillation column for hydrolysis system has not yet been explored. In this work, the hydrolysis reaction of methyl lactate to produce lactic acid (LA) is carried out in a middle vessel column with fixed batch time while control variables are treated as a piecewise constant reflux ratio (multiple time intervals) and a single reboil ratio. For MVC, the LA being the heaviest in the reaction mixture, reflux and reboil ratios policy plays an important role to achieve high purity of LA.
