Abstract:
The industrial synthesis of crude methanol from natural gas has improved a great deal in past decades due to improvements in catalyst performance. This has significantly reduced the ethanol in distillation feed from 600 ppm to 150 ppm, making the separation much easier. However most plants in operation today date back decades and some operate the distillation columns under outdated operating ideologies. This paper uses a reliable multicomponent high purity distillation model built using commercial simulator software to investigate the effect of improvements in catalyst performance on distillation. This information is then used to determine optimal recovery and throughput operating conditions for different economic situations.
