Hi everyone,
I am currently working on a project trying to design a process. This process being a continuous reactive distillation for the synthesis of tributyl citrate from citric acid and butanol in the presence of an ion-exchange resin catalyst. We are currently doing experiments to determine the kinetic parameters of the reaction.
The experiments being in progress, the process cannot be realistically designed on Aspen. Instead of waiting for the results, I am currently trying to design a similar case. The similar process is a triethyl citrate synthesis by reactive distillation, it uses ethanol instead of butanol and the data regarding this experiment is easily gathered in the literature (the article I am using is “Triethyl citrate synthesis by Reactive Distillation” by Aspi K. Kolah, Navinchandra S. Asthana, Dung T. Vu, Carl T. Lira, Dennis J. Miller).
The main problem I encounter when designing this process is the lack of data concerning some of the components involved in the process in the Aspen components databanks. I tried to use the “User defined” components, adding some common properties (boiling point,…) and defining the UNIFAC groups of these components but the program does not seem to consider them as valid components and does not even want to evaluate their properties with UNIFAC.
Is there another way to calculate their properties? Is the UNIFAC method not enough to get all the data I need to start designing the process on Aspen?
Thank you for your future answers
I am currently working on a project trying to design a process. This process being a continuous reactive distillation for the synthesis of tributyl citrate from citric acid and butanol in the presence of an ion-exchange resin catalyst. We are currently doing experiments to determine the kinetic parameters of the reaction.
The experiments being in progress, the process cannot be realistically designed on Aspen. Instead of waiting for the results, I am currently trying to design a similar case. The similar process is a triethyl citrate synthesis by reactive distillation, it uses ethanol instead of butanol and the data regarding this experiment is easily gathered in the literature (the article I am using is “Triethyl citrate synthesis by Reactive Distillation” by Aspi K. Kolah, Navinchandra S. Asthana, Dung T. Vu, Carl T. Lira, Dennis J. Miller).
The main problem I encounter when designing this process is the lack of data concerning some of the components involved in the process in the Aspen components databanks. I tried to use the “User defined” components, adding some common properties (boiling point,…) and defining the UNIFAC groups of these components but the program does not seem to consider them as valid components and does not even want to evaluate their properties with UNIFAC.
Is there another way to calculate their properties? Is the UNIFAC method not enough to get all the data I need to start designing the process on Aspen?
Thank you for your future answers