The rigorous design and optimization of a complex, plant-wide dimethyl oxalate (DMO) synthesis process from syngas is firstly developed in this work. The whole process can be roughly divided into two sections. The first one is to produce DMO through the coupling reaction, in which CO is reacted with the intermediate, methyl nitrite (MN). This section includes the production, and also the purification of DMO. The second one is the regeneration reaction to get back MN through a packed column reactor, which is simulated as a modified version of reactive distillation column. After the basic design, systematic optimization is investigated through minimizing total annual cost, and the potential heat integration strategy is also proposed. During optimization, we found that the methanol circulation rate inside the process is the most influential variable, and a higher methanol flow rate (defined as MeOH/NOs) within an acceptable region leads to better economic performance.

这项工作首先是对合成气中复杂的，全厂范围的草酸二甲酯（DMO）合成工艺进行了严格的设计和优化。整个过程可以大致分为两个部分。第一种是通过偶联反应生产DMO，其中CO与中间体亚硝酸甲酯（MN）反应。此部分包括DMO的生产和纯化。第二个是通过填充塔反应器返回MN的再生反应，该反应器被模拟为反应蒸馏塔的改进版本。在基本设计之后，通过最小化年度总成本对系统优化进行了研究，并提出了潜在的热集成策略。在优化过程中，我们发现工艺内部的甲醇循环速率是影响最大的变量，