Intensification of methyl acetate hydrolysis process: A novel transformation using steam-driven vapor recompression

The traditional methyl acetate (MeAc) hydrolysis process requires large energy consumption, including a reac-tive distillation column (RD) and the subsequent separation columns. The heat integrated technologies can improve the energy utilization of distillation column. Among them, vapor recompression technology (VRC) is a simple and more practical technology to retrofit the distillation column in the real industry. However, the current VRC design is still based on the electric-driven form, although some real industries have established the boiler room to drive the VRC with steam turbine. On this account, the thermodynamic cycle of steam-driven compressor gives the opportunities of potential energy intensification in the distillation process. In this paper, the steam-driven VRC is used to intensify the energy utilization of MeAc hydrolysis process which constructs the novel transformation. A novel steam-driven VRC and organic Rankine cycle (ORC) intensified MeAc hydrolysis process is established. Besides, the traditional electric-driven VRC transformed processes are constructed as comparisons. Totally, four processes are established and compared with energy, exergy, economic and envi-ronmental analysis. The genetic algorithm (GA) is used to optimize distillation column and ORC is optimized with a fast and elitist non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II). The results show that the steam-driven compressor can significantly reduce the energy consumption (44.4 %) and total annual cost (35.5 %). Besides, steam-driven vapor recompression gives a novel way to intensify the distillation process with sufficient energy utilization.