It has been extensively proven that thermally coupled distillation columns can effectively use less energy than their conventional counterparts. Similarly, the extension to reactive systems has also shown that thermally coupled reactive distillation columns can reduce the energy consumption in comparison with their conventional reactive distillation counterparts. This work aims to show that by realizing heat integration between thermally coupled columns at different pressure, further energy savings can be attained. The diphenyl carbonate production process has been taken up to show that there is a synergistic effect when thermally coupling and heat integration are combined in the same distillation sequence. The results showed that the proposed system could attain 47% energy savings in comparison with conventional a reactive distillation sequence while keeping good rejection of throughput and feed composition disturbances.

业已广泛证明，与传统的同类产品相比，热耦合蒸馏塔可有效使用更少的能源。类似地，对反应体系的扩展也表明，与常规反应蒸馏对应物相比，热耦合反应蒸馏塔可以减少能耗。这项工作旨在表明，通过在不同压力下实现热耦合柱之间的热集成，可以进一步节省能源。碳酸二苯酯的生产过程已经显示出，当在相同的蒸馏顺序中将热偶合和热整合结合在一起时，会产生协同效应。