Control Structure Selection for a Reactive Distillation Column

In recent years in tegrated processes have attracted considerable attention in both academic research and industrial applications. The integration, for instance of reaction and separation, reduces the degrees of freedom and requires tigh t con trol to operate the processes at optimal conditions. F rom the available number of measurements and input variables, a con trol structure has to be iden ti edwhich guarantees the best performance. In this paper, w e discuss the application of a systematic con trolstructure selection consisting of pre-screening of structures and calculation of the attainable performance for the heterogenous catalyzed esteri cation of methyl acetate in a batch reactive distillation column. The approach is applied to a linearized model of 85 order of the nonlinear system. To verify the predictions of the con trolstructure selection method, linear con trollersare designed for the favorable structures by using a frequency response approximation method. The resulting linear con troller is applied to the nonlinear model and shows good performance.