Studi Dinamika Proses Distilasi Reaktif Dalam Produksi 2-Ethylhexyl- Dodecanoate Menggunakan Aspen Plus Dynamics: Fungsi Alih Antara Komposisi Produk Terhadap Beban Reboiler dan Laju Refluks

Abstract

In chemical industry, control system is one of the most important things to ensure production quality and safety. In designing the control system, dynamics models in the form of transfer functions are required. In a complex process the transfer functions are derived from black box models, in which the relationships between input and output variables are obtained from the dynamic data regression. One of the complex processes that can be found in the chemical industry is reactive distillation (RD). RD control system usually take the products compositions as controlled variable (CV) while manipulated variable or controller output (CO) are reboiler duty and reflux flow rate. This research aims to find the form of the transfer function between CV and CO, as well as the values of the parameters of the transfer function. To achieve this goals, dynamic simulations of RD column was carried out by step test using Aspen Plus Dynamics. The result was then regressed to obtain the most appropriate transfer function. The chemical process that is applied in the column RD is the production of 2-ethylhexyl-dodecanoate, a fatty acid ester which has a high economic value for it is widely used as raw materials of specialty chemical.