A synthesis procedure for the design of semicontinuous reactive distillation for specialty chemicals.

Semicontinuous reactive distillation (SRD) is a novel processing technique that tightly integrates reactions and separations together using forced cyclic principles. Previous simulations of SRD have shown that it is not only feasible, but also economically superior to equivalent batch and continuous processes for a wide range of production rates. Although the SRD process is complex, the suggested synthesis algorithm provides a method for generating an SRD schema from continuous or batch designs.