PLANTWIDE CONTROL STUDY OF A VINYL ACETATE MONOMER PROCESS DESIGN

ABSTRACT

A simulation of a vinyl acetate monomer (VAM) process design was developed and compared with the work of Luyben and Tyreus (1998 Luyben , M. L. and Tyreus , B. D. ( 1998 ). An industrial design/control study for the vinyl acetate monomer process , Comput. Chem. Eng. , 22 , 867 – 877 . CSA] CROSSREF] Crossref], Web of Science ®] , Google Scholar]). Two incremental changes were made to the two main control substructures. Specifically, the two schemes focus on improving the liquid inventory system control and controllability of the azeotropic distillation column. The level control strategy was tested and found to produce a faster response with less oscillatory behavior. Two alternative control techniques for the azeotropic distillation column were tested, a feed-forward model predictive controller and a static feed-forward ratio controller. The model predictive controller results illustrated the large difference between the water composition analyzer sample time and the controller step size. The static feed-forward ratio controller showed excellent disturbance rejection of large feed flow variations to the azeotropic distillation column. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the new control strategies.