The problem to seek further heat integration for the hydration of ethylene oxide by reactive distillation (RD) to produce ethylene glycol

which involves reactions with highly thermal effect

was investigated.An innovative process

internally heat-integrated RD column (R-HIDiC)

was proposed to maximize energy efficiency of the system

in which the reactive section and stripping section was partitioned into two parts with different operating pressures so that the internal heat transfer between reactive section and stripping section was allowed.Steady-state simulations based on Aspen Plus software were performed to investigate the feasibility of internal heat integration

and an energy integration design without the need of reboiler was provided by optimizing the heat distribution in R-HIDiC.The results obtained demonstrated that

comparing with the conventional design

the proposed R-HIDiC design did not need a reboiler

thus

the total energy input can be supplied by the heat of reaction of the hydration of ethylene oxide and the electricity power of compressor

which leads to a reduction of the operating and total cost by 47.2% and 39.1%

respectively.