Design of control structure for energy-integrated hydrodealkylation (HDA) process

Abstract

Design of plantwide control structures for an entire chemical plant consisting of recycle streams and energy integration is very important in order to achieve its design objectives. This work presents the new control structures for the hydrodealkylation of toluene (HDA) process with energy integration schemes alternative 3. Five control structures have been designed, tested and compared the performance with Luybens structure (CS1). The result shows that hydrodealkylation of toluene process with heat integration can reduce energy cost. Furthermore, this process can be operated well by using plantwide methodology to design the control structure. The dynamic responses of the designed control structures and the reference structure are similar. The CS2 has been limited in bypass, so it is able to handle in small disturbance. CS3 has been designed to improve CS2 in order to handle more disturbances by using auxiliary heater instead of bypass valve to control temperature of stabilizer column. The recycle column temperature control response of the CS4 is faster than that of the previous control structures, because reboiler duty of column can control the column temperature more effective than bottom flow. CS5 on-demand structure has an advantage when downstream customer desires immediate responses in the availability of the product stream from this process. The energy used in CS6 control structure is less than CS1 and CS4. Because, this control structure has been modified from CS2 and CS4 to optimize the energy cost