Executive Summary

The typical gas-liquid contacting operations include distillation, absorption, stripping,

leaching and humidification. Distillation and absorption are two most widely used mass
transfer processes in chemical industries also can be categorized as pressure vessel.
Chemical design of plate column for absorption and distillation involves many common
steps of calculation such as determination of number of theoretical plates, chemical
reaction which includes mass balances and energy balances. Meanwhile, material and
mechanical design of distillation column involves series of calculation such as design
pressure, design temperature, selection of material of construction, vessel thickness,
heads selection and thickness, total dead weight loads of vessel, wind loading,
dynamic wind pressure, seismic loading, critical buckling stress, stiffening ring
requirement and lastly vessel support design. This report outlines the material and
mechanical design of reactive distillation column (T-100) for production of 65, 000
MTPA of methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) at high purity. The summary to the design
conditions are as follows: