Avaliação do efeito do teor de solvente e da integração térmica no controle do processo de obtenção de etanol anidro via destilação extrativa.

Abstract

Extractive distillation is a method widely used in the alcohol industry to obtain anhydrous ethanol, which process consists of two distillation columns where the first column (extractive distillation column) has the function to dehydrate ethanol and the second column (recovery column) recovers the solvent used in the process. Distillation columns are responsible for a very high energy consumption in a plant and thus various methods of optimization, which results suggest changes in operating conditions and system design, have been published in the literature. In addition to the need for this system to operate in optimum conditions, it is also necessary to provide an efficient control system that is able to maintain anhydrous ethanol produced within the desired specification even after the disturbances that normally occur in this process. Thus, the theme of this work arose from the union of these two important points, optimization and control, in which the goal is to study the dynamic behavior and the control of the extractive distillation process for obtaining anhydrous ethanol, using ethylene glycol as a solvent and thermal integration between process streams. Under this scope, specific objectives nonexistent in the literature were drawn, which are the influences of thermal integration, solvent content and the degree of purity of anhydrous ethanol to be obtained on the control of extractive distillation systems. The results show that the solvent content and the presence of thermal integration causes deviations in the product composition of interest (anhydrous ethanol) compared to the process without heat integration, when disturbances occur in the feed for the same control system. The degree of purity of anhydrous ethanol to be obtained also causes influence over controllability. Generally, these effects are exhibited more markedly when the system operates with high solvent content (optimum operating point). So changes were proposed for the control scheme, providing better results for these cases.