Simulation Studies and Sensitivity Analysis of Methyl Tert-butyl Ether Reactive Distillation

Methyl Tert-butyl Ether (MTBE) is an important chemical used as an octane booster in gasoline to replace tetra ethyl lead. Maximum production of the MTBE can be achieved using reactive distillation (RD) process at the optimum operating conditions and column configuration. However, optimizing the column configuration such as tray or catalyst location is experimentally expensive. Therefore, a reliable model of the MTBE reactive distillation is important to find the optimum conditions for MTBE production. In this work, continuous RD processes is simulated based on dynamic model using Aspen Dynamics. The model is then further used in Matlab environment for the singular value decomposition (SVD) analysis in order to select the feasible input-output pair for the control implementation. Finally, the step test is conducted in order to observe the sensitivity of the MTBE process toward changes of selected input variables. The results show that the output obtained from the Aspen is comparable with the literature and the tray temperature number 3 and 8 are the most sensitive output variables toward changes of reflux flowrate and reboiler duty.