Design and control of coupled reactor/column systems .2. More complex coupled reactor/column systems

This paper is the second in a series of papers that explore the challenging problems associated with the design and control of coupled reactor/column systems. The steadystate designs and dynamics of three kinds of coupled systems, a binary reactor/stripper system, a multicomponent reactor/rectifier system, and a multicomponent reactor/rectifier/stripper system are studied in this paper. We concentrated on confirming that the results from the simply binary reactor/rectifier system, considered in Part 1, can be applied to other configurations and more complex systems. A design procedure and an optimum steadystate design for each system are presented, and the effects of physical parameters on optimum design are described. Viable control structures for various types of coupled systems are proposed. The control structure that worked well in a binary system was found to require only minor modification to provide effective control of more complex systems. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd