Plantwide control structures design for butyl acetate process

Abstract

A structure of most industrial processes, including many different unit operations, several recycle streams and energy integration, is a complex flowsheet. Therefore plantwide control structure design is an important way to control processes which become more complex so that processes are designed and operated closer to constraints. This research is design of plantwide control structures for butyl acetate process, which consist of a reactor, three distillation columns and two recycle streams. It can be produced by the reaction of methyl acetate with butanol in a reversible, liquid-phase, mildly exothermic reaction. Methanol is the second product. The objective of this research is selection of controlled variables so that finding which variables that should be controlled system for quickly responding to disturbances and adjusting self to steady state while minimizing the deviation of the product quality. Plantwide control procedure of Wongsri(2012) is chosen for design the new control structures in order to develop control loops to achieve the required objectives. Steady state designs were performed in commercial process simulator and evaluate the performance using integrated absolute error (IAE) of the designed control structures.