A reactive distillation (RD) process for the production of ethanolamine from ethylene oxide (EO) and ammonia catalyzed by water was presented. The possible selectivity and energy consumption benefits of the proposed process were examined by theoretical simulations using the Aspen Plus software package. The effects of different designs and operating variables on the performance of the RD column were investigated based on sensitivity analysis so that the near-optimal parameters for preliminary process design were obtained. For identifying the potentials of the RD process for ethanolamine manufacture, the total annual cost (TAC) of the RD-based process were compared with a conventional plug-flow reactor based process. The results obtained indicated that the TAC was reduced by 39.1%. Therefore, it could be concluded that RD process was promising for the production of ethanolamine.

提出了一种反应蒸馏（RD）工艺，由环氧乙烷（EO）和水催化氨生产乙醇胺。使用Aspen Plus软件包通过理论模拟检查了所提出方法的可能的选择性和能耗优势。基于敏感性分析，研究了不同设计和操作变量对RD色谱柱性能的影响，从而获得了初步工艺设计的最佳参数。为了确定RD方法在乙醇胺生产中的潜力，将基于RD的方法的年总成本（TAC）与基于常规活塞流反应器的方法进行了比较。获得的结果表明，TAC减少了39.1％。因此，