Theory and Application of Nonlinear Wave Propagation Phenomena in Combined Reaction / Separation Processes

In the chemical industry the demands regarding process efficiency are permanently increasing. At the same time methods to design indiviual process stages and interconnect them to higly integrated process are reaching their preformance limit. To overcome these limitations the focus of current research has turned to combined processes, i.e. processes that combine the tasks of different process stages into a single process stage. The thesis at hand concentrates on combined reaction/separation processes, namely reactive distillation and reactive chromatography. In order to fully understand and exploit these processes a theory describing their stationary and dynamic behavior is developed. This theory is based on a transformation to equivalent separation processes in the limit of simultaneous phase and reaction equilibrium and enables an analysis in the framework of nonlinear wave propagation theory. A subsequent discussion of secondary effects such as e.g. finite reaction rates and finite mass transfer rates then shows that the theoretical results may be extended to processes that are sufficiently close to simultaneous phase and reaction equilibrium. The developed theory is used to analyse processes ranging from simple model systems to highly complex multi reaction systems. In the analysis of simple model systems analogies between separtion processes and corresponding combined reaction/separation processes as well as distillation and chromatographic processes are revealed. In the analysis of the complex multi reaction systems the developed theory is a valuable tool since it gives a global picture of the system dynamics. Finaly new concepts for process control are developed based on the comprehensive insight to the process dynamics provided by the developed theory. These concepts comprise constructive methods to observer design, a model based control concept for chromatographic processes as well as nonlinear and model predictive control of distillation columns.