Recycle vinyl acetate monomer process

The final example to illustrate our plantwide control design procedure comes from Luyben and Tyreus (1998), who present design details of an industrial process for the vapor-phase manufacture of vinyl acetate monomer. This process is uniquely suited for researchers pursuing process simulation, design, and control studies. It has common real chemical components in a realistically large process flowsheet with standard chemical unit operations, gas and liquid recycle streams, and energy integration. 

The process considered in this chapter involved the production of vinyl acetate monomer. It features many unit operations, many components, nonideal phase equilibrium, unusual reaction kinetics, two recycle streams, and three fresh reactant makeup streams. 

Polyvinyl alcohol is typically produced by the hydrolysis of polyvinyl acetate in a continuous process [52, 53], Although specialty grades of polyvinyl acetate may be formed using a batch process, the majority of commercial polyvinyl acetate is formed by the free radical polymerization of a vinyl acetate solution in methanol using a continuous process. Polymerization reactions are typically conducted at 55-85 °C, where heat is removed from the reaction mixture by condensing the monomer. At the end of the process, residual vinyl acetate and methanol are stripped from the reactor and recycled. Polyvinyl acetate formed by this process has long and short chain... 

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