Difficulties
The conditions in the reactive column are suboptimal both as a chemical reactor and as a distillation column, since the reactive column combines these.
The introduction of an in situ separation process in the reaction zone or vice versa leads to complex interactions between vapor-liquid equilibrium, mass transfer rates, diffusion and chemical kinetics, which poses a great challenge for design and synthesis of these systems.
Side reactors, where a separate column feeds a reactor and vice versa, are better for some reactions, if the optimal conditions of distillation and reaction differ too much.
Read more about this topic: Reactive Distillation
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