Reactive Distillation for Tert-butyl Alcohol Dehydration with Dynamic Matrix Control

Reactive distillation for tert-butyl alcohol dehydration to isobutene and water catalyzed with the cation exchange resin was carried out. A mathematical model for simulating the process was developed and verified by the experimental results. Then, the dynamic matrix control (DMC) method was put into the process to achieve an efficient control for high purity isobutene from the top of the reactive distillation column. The tracking test and anti-disturbance test of the control system were carried out, and the effect of DMC parameters such as predictive length, control weighting matrix, error weighting matrix and reference trajectory coefficient on the performances of DMC were discussed. The results show that the tuning of these parameters has significant effect to the performances of DMC.