Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Vol.38, No.2, 451-455, 1999
On the steady-state multiplicities for an ethylene glycol reactive distillation column
An ethylene glycol column is studied in this paper, where the main objective is to describe the bifurcation diagram with respect to the reboiler boilup ratio. The bifurcation analysis reveals the existence of a unique equilibrium point at low reboiler heat inputs and three equilibrium points (two stable and one unstable) at high reboiler heat inputs. Moreover, the existence of input multiplicities at moderate and high product purity is also revealed.
Keywords:TERT-BUTYL ETHER