A novel distillate policy for batch reactive distillation with application to the production of butyl acetate

Considering the longstanding importance of batch distillation in chemical production, it is surprising that the utility of manipulating operating policies was not understood until. the 1970s. This is partly due to the mathematical difficulty of finding the time-optimal policy. Perhaps the most elegant and effective treatment of this problem is found in the work of Mayur and Jackson (Chem. Eng. J. 1971, 2, 150-163). They used Pontryagin's maximum principle to find the optimal reflux policy for the batch distillation of ideal multicomponent mixtures. In this paper, motivated by Mayur and Jackson's classic treatment, we examine a novel distillate policy and a conventional column configuration for batch distillation with chemical reaction. This distillate policy leads to a new explicit reflux policy for the special class of equimolar reactions. For the particular case of butyl acetate production, it is shown that this leads to complete conversion of ingredients and high-purity products, which are unattainable by the traditional approach, in a single operation.