Objectif
Processes combining reaction and separation into a single, integrated operation become ever more attractive for chemical, pharmaceutical and related industries. Such reactive separations show several important advantages like energy and capital cost reduction, increase of reaction yield and reduction of waste emission. Both feasibility and efficiency of reactive separation operations are predetermined by a correct choice of the column internals. Traditional design of reactive separations is ultimately linked with internals offered to the market by suppliers. However, these internals are far short of optimum and cannot provide optimal process functioning. The proposal is aimed at the creation of a principally novel methodology for the design of reactive separations. This methodology together with the relevant software tools and experimental techniques establishes a new relation suppliers-end user which enables process optimisation based on the development of new "intelligent", "tailor-made" column internals. This is an active way by which a column design approaches from both structural operational points of view.
-Integrated Design System consisting of an expert system (ADVISER), a CFD tool (CFX-INTINT) and a process simulator (PROFILER) for homogeneously and heterogeneously catalysed reactive distillation and stripping*ADVISER including the case-based selector, GUI, the database of the accepted solutions (software code) and manual
-PROFILER including the detailed rate-based model, model library for homogeneously and heterogeneously catalysed processes (software code) and manual
-CFX-INTINT including GUI, grid generator, modelling capabilities for different internals geometries with relevant post-processing facilities (software code) and manual
-Model library, database and input files for physicochemical properties and transport coefficients of the test systems (software code and description)
-Experimental results on system-related model parameters (VLE, reaction kinetics) for five chemical systems
-Experimental results on hydraulic and mass-transfer parameters for all catalytic internals
-Manufactured column internals and their modifications
-Commissioned experimental set-ups for reactive stripping and reactive distillation and pilot plant experiments for different systems in different equipment, for known and modified geometry
-Methodology combining four steps, namely the pre-selection of the relevant internals class by ADVISER, a preliminary sensitivity study by PROFILER, the generation of new internals and their investigation (virtual experiments) by CFX-INTINT, and the completing analysis of the reactive separation unit by PROFILER
-Demonstration of a number of industrial applications at pilot scale and establishment of standardised experimental techniques for the parameter estimation and scale-up
-Experimental validation of PROFILER by the reactive distillation and reactive stripping experiments
-Web pages summarising the results of the project
Champ scientifique
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftware
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesdatabases
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligenceexpert systems
- engineering and technologychemical engineeringseparation technologiesdistillation
- natural sciencesmathematicspure mathematicsgeometry