Abstract
Esterification of fatty acid (Decanoic Acid) is a common practice in the chemical industries, which can be widely used in several applications such as lubricants agent, plasticizers in polymer industries, pharmaceutical and food industries, solvents for inks and paint removal, and detergents. Methyl decanoate (MeDC) as fatty ester is an important chemical component. Reactive distillation columns have been successfully employed in many reaction systems where reaction and separation takes place simultaneously. In this paper, the performance of esterification of decanoic acid to produce MeDC is considered using the newly developed integrated conventional batch (i-CBD) and semi-batch distillation processes (SBD). The performances of these column configurations are evaluated in terms of profitability via minimisation of production time for a given separation task. Additional operational constraints into SBD column are posed in the optimisation problem to avoid overflowing of still pot at any time of the process due to continuous feeding of methanol into the bottom of column as the reboiler is initially charged to its full capacity. The optimization results clearly demonstrate that the SBD system is more attractive operation in terms of batch time and energy consumption savings, maximum conversion level and higher annual profit as compared to the i-CBD column.
