The Simulation Study Of Methanol Synthesis And Distillation Process

Methanol is widely used in organic synthesis, coatings, medical and fuel industry. As one of the most import products of coal chemical industry and alternative energy sources, it is very important in global chemical market. In this paper, Aspen Plus was used as a modeling tool to establish reasonable process simulation models for specially Methanol Production, On one hand, meaningful management information guidance was obtained form the production process, on the other hand, reference data was provided for large methanol plant process design and operation to gain the objective of raising yield, decreasing energy consumption, stabilizing production and achieving more economic benefits.In methanol synthesis process, RK-SOAVE was used as the property method, and RPLUG reactor model was chosen as the simulation tool Based on the established flowsheet simulation, some major operating parameters (such as operating pressure, recycling ratio, inert gas concentration in feed gas, the outlet gas temperature of cooler and H/C ratio in feed gas on methanol synthesis process) have also been analyzed, the result shows influence trend can well reflect the actual situation of methanol synthesis mechanism, which can be summarized as follows:the increase of the pressure and recycle ratio, the decrease of the inert gas concentration in the feed gas and outlet gas temperature of cooler are favorable to increase methanol yield and reduce feed consumption.WILS-RK as the property method was used in the four-column methanol distillation process, RadFrac unit was chosen as distillation model. This distillation process was intensively analyzed and discussed, it turns out that the simulation results are in good agreement with practical industrial production data by employing suitable blocks and operation parameters. It is believed that the well-founded simulation files in this work are very helpful for guiding the practical methanol distillation operation.The whole process heat integration of methanol plant is simulated with Aspen Energy Analyzer. And with the pinch technology was used to match hot streams with cold streams, then a heat exchanger network with the lowest energy consumption was obtained.