Investigation of Operating Conditions Effect on Dimethyl ether Production by Methanol

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Faculty of chemical, Petroleum and Gas Engineering

2 Faculty of Chemical, Petroleum and Gas Engineering, Semnan University

Abstract

In this study, the process of Dimethyl ether (DME) production by Methanol (MeOH) was simulated. The UNIQUAC and Peng-Robinson equations were applied as activity model and equation of state in the simulation model, respectively. To evaluate the effect of operational parameters on DME production, the impact of reactor temperature and dimensions, distillate rate, and reflux ratio from two distillation columns were investigated. The results indicated that with an increase in the reactor residence time, a maximum conversion of 85% is achieved for all studied temperature ranges. Results showed that by increasing the first distillation column (T-10 column) feed flow rate from 130 kmol/h to 170 kmol/hr, the purity of DME decreases by about 40%, but the recovery rate of DME enhances by about 30%. Furthermore, changes in the reflux ratio of the T-10 column in the range of 0.35 to 0.8 showed a low effect on the DME purity and recovery. Also, it was observed that with enhancement of T-10 column distillate rate from 110 kmol/h to 130 kmol/h, the reactor conversion increased by about 7%. Upon raising the flow rate of recycle stream from 50 kmol/h to 250 kmol/h, the reactor conversion and DME purity in the product stream decrease about 45% and 20%, respectively. Finally, using genetic algorithm (GA) method, the operational conditions were optimized to reach maximum purity of DME in the final product. Results showed reflux ratio of second distillation column has the main effect at enchantment of product DME purity.

Keywords

Progress in Engineering Thermodynamics and Kinetics
Volume 1, Issue 3
September 2025

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics