Abstract—The scope of this research is to emphasize the importance, possibility and benefits about the coupling of exothermic and endothermic reactions. Coupling could be hydration with dehydration, oxidation with reduction and hydrogenation with dehydrogenation. Nonlinear analysis of reactor-separation-recycle shows difficulties in controlling integrated plants when un-reacted reactant is recycled. As a case study simultaneous hydrogenation of Nitrobenzene to Aniline with dehydrogenation of Methyl-cyclohexane to Toluene is investigated. Instead of multi-tubular reactor, the coupled reaction is carried out in a single tube adiabatic reactor, therefore the complex set-up for hydrogenation and large amount of hydrogen to avoid reaction run-away are no longer required. The steady state and dynamic state behaviour of an integrated plant is analysed using AspenPlus and AspenDynamics respectively. On implementing plantwide control structure the change in production rate is studied. The new system is simpler, stable and robust to feed disturbances. The results obtained here are also applicable to other chemical processes of practical relevance.
Index Terms—Aspen, exothermic and endothermic reactions, process integration, reactor-separation-recycle, parametric sensitivity.
Ahtesham Javaid is with Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, P. O. Box. 1114, Islamabad, Pakistan (e-mail: ahteshamjavaid@hotmail.com).
Costin S. Bildea is with the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania.
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Cite: Ahtesham Javaid and Costin S. Bildea, "Design and Control of an Integrated Toluene-Aniline Production Plant a Preliminary Study," International Journal of Chemical Engineering
and Applications vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 267-271, 2017.