Optimal design and control of a reactive distillation system

This article presents the design and control of a reactive distillation system utilizing recent advances in mixed integer dynamic optimization. A high fidelity dynamic model is used to predict the behavior of the process under time-varying disturbances. Design and control decisions, involving both discrete and continuous variables, are simultaneously optimized leading to a more economically attractive and better controlled system than that obtained by following a sequential optimization approach. It is shown that the resulting design and control scheme can guarantee feasible operation under bounded uncertainty at a minimum total average cost, representing ∼17% savings over the original design.