The time consumed in starting up the distillation unit with appreciable holdups can be an important fraction of the total distillation time,particular for catalytic distillation systems with large holdups.To optimize the whole process,the start-up period has to be considered as a part of the complete catalytic distillation process.In this paper,BP artificial neural network model was presented as a tool to estimate the start-up process for a given catalytic distillation system.It can been seen that through the examination of the case studied in this work,a good start-up policy can reduce both the energy and time requirements in the start-up phase of catalytic distillation processes.The results based on 20 start-up policies showed that the time consumed in start-up period with an average error of 4.140% and a maximum error of 10.291% for the case studied in this work.The accuracy of the model will depend upon the data available and the type of model.
