The process characteristics and control strategy of a high-purity IPA reactive distillation column were investigated. A robust nominal operation was found by maintaining an excess of propylene feed to the column and recycling the unreacted propylene to the feed instead of the top stage. Stage temperature and propylene composition with one-to-one relationship with reboiler duty and propylene feed are selected as controlled variables for maintaining bottom purity and feed ratio in the presence of possible measurement bias respectively. High nonlinearity between selected input-output pair was reduced by using variable transformation. Dynamic simulations demonstrated that such a control scheme with nonlinear transformed variable was capable of providing much superior control performance than the one using natural variable. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.