Procedimentos de partida aplicados a uma coluna de destilação extrativa para obtenção de etanol anidro.

Abstract

Due to the nature of the transition the startup of a distillation process has a large number of operational problems. These problems often affect time undertaken for the attainment of the steady state and the plant begins to operate as desired. From the development of an appropriate starting, it is possible to minimize transients involved in this step, thereby reducing the time required to reach steady state. This work arose from the observation of technical literature consulted, which has few reports of systematic studies on strategies to reduce the transition time at the starting distillation units, particularly in terms of extractive distillation. Therefore, this study was to develop, implement and evaluate alternative procedures for starting operation applied to an extractive distillation column which is part of anhydrous ethanol production process, from an originally composed by azeotropic mixture ethanol- water using ethylene glycol as solvent. This study aimed to minimize the time required for the extraction column under study to establish the steady state. The simulations to represent the model of multicomponent distillation were carried out in the commercial simulator Aspen PlusTM and Aspen Plus DynamicsTM. The work also contemplated to implement a control configuration can avoid the formation of transients in the process, but also made the evacuation system, resulting in an empty column model and cold temperature of 20 C and pressure of 1 bar. Three procedures were analyzed for starter operation: feeding the column with the ethanol-water mixture and the solvent while feeding after 0.5 hours the solvent power of ethanol-water mixture, and feeding the solvent 1.0 hours after feeding the ethanol-water mixture. As expected, it was observed that feeding the distillation column with the ethanol-water mixture and the solvent at the same time, the time obtained as a result of transient lower than the others.