Design and Comparison of Optimal Reactor Concepts for the Hydroformylation of Olefins by Use of a Probabilistic Design Framework

摘要

Reactor design approaches often do not allow designing entirely innovative reactors and considering the impact of uncertainties during the design procedure. Therefore a probabilistic design framework is proposed in this work. Its advantages are exemplified on the reactor design task for the hydroformylation of 1-dodecene in a thermomorphic solvent system. It is illustrated how different types of uncertainties are included and how their impact on the performance and the predictive power of the performance can be quantified. Therefore two reactor concepts, namely a PFTR and a cascade of CSTRs, are compared. The results indicate that the spatially controlled PFTR shows higher performance than the CSTR cascade but has a lower predictive power of the performance. There are operation points at which the approximation by the CSTR cascade is preferable since it is less sensitive to uncertainties.