Load Studing Of The Reaction Column

Ethyl acetate ( EtAc ) is the most popular, important industry solvent with little toxicity among acetate esters. It's main application as dilution for printing ink, solvent for paint, artificial leather, acetic acid fibrin, nitric acid fibrin etc and solvent for pharmacy industry like penicillin, chloromycetin, mysone, vitamine etc. It's also widely used in the dyeing, flavor, synthetic rubber, glue etc industry. With the development of people's environment care awareness and government's stricter requirement on health, safety and environment protection, it's the trend to replace the use of benzene, toluene with non toxic acetate ester. So there's a wide ester solvent market in short future.This article looks deeply into the Yangtze River Acetyls Co. ltd.'s plant's problem of inability to reach its full design rate due to inefficient de-water in the reaction column. Improvement effort is tried to reflux some product back into system to form azeotrope with water ( called "de-water reflux" ), the reflux is done through 4 points on reactor or reaction column to find out the best injection point without big modification to the process and equipments. And later modification was done based on the found best point. This in practice proved to be a good solution against inefficient de-water, inability to reaching full rate problem with simpler operation and better de-water efficiency, plant day rate reached up to and even over the design 278 ton from former 256 ton.The company's current Acetate Ester plant is based on the technology licensedfrom bp, UK. The modification mentioned in this article solved the problem bp couldn't solve for many years and can increase income RMB7.24 million for the company.This article provides a new philosophy for azeotrope refining and multi-ends separation and can be a good example for similar problem solving.