Purification of lactic acid by reactive distillation (RD) is a novel technology which has many excellent characteristics compared with traditional technologies. This paper presented a non-equilibrium model for lactic acid purification RD pilot column. An Improved Separation Efficiency Function (ISEF) was proposed based on de-coupling and pseudo-homogenous assumptions, which greatly improved the solving efficiency and made this model suitable for practical application. Simulation results were consistent with the experiments in different conditions, and the simulation results outperformed the simulator ASPEN PLUS in which the equilibrium stage assumptions were adopted. The static characteristics of the pilot setup were also investigated.The analysis result could help to accelerate the commercialization of the lactic acid purification RD technology.
