Direct Conversion of TBA to Isooctene

Isooctene production, from TBA using catalytic distillation (CD), offers a significantly compressed flowsheet verses fixed bed process alternatives. For CD, TBA feed can be directly converted into Isooctene and water, which exits as bottoms co-products and is easily phase separated for fuels production. It is of particular importance, for this coupled process system, to address the system control methodology as the system thermodynamics lend themselves towards two “real” steady state operations. This is the first CD system, which is arguably known, to have such true 2 steady-state system behavior.