Analysis and nonlinear control of an ethyl acetate reactive distillation column

In this work, we study a reactive distillation column for the production of ethyl acetate. Initially we propose a configuration that involves feeding the two reactants in different trays and allows obtaining higher conversion and purity than the conventional configuration that involves feeding in a single tray. A nonlinear controller is then designed to control the product purity in this new configuration with good set-point tracking and disturbance rejection properties, and its performance is compared with that of a linear proportional-integral (PI) controller