Commercial application of reactive distillation.
\r\n\tThe study of populations and plant communities in their different aspects; ecological, structural, functional and dynamic, it is essential to establish a posteriori models of forest and agricultural management.
\r\n\r\n\tFor this, the methodological approaches on the type of sampling are considered essential, since there are differences between the purely ecological and the phytosociological methods, despite the fact that both pursue the same objective.
\r\n\tAlthough the ecological method for the knowledge of the vegetation is widely extended, the phytosociological one is no less so, since in the European Union it has been developed as a consequence of policies on sustainability, through which regulations have been issued, such as the habitats directive.
\r\n\tOn the other hand, research on plant dynamics and knowledge of the landscape in an integral way, have multiplied in the last 30 years, which has favored a deep knowledge of the floristic and phytocenotic wealth, which is fundamental for agricultural management, livestock and forestry.
",isbn:"978-1-83969-386-1",printIsbn:"978-1-83969-385-4",pdfIsbn:"978-1-83969-387-8",doi:null,price:0,priceEur:0,priceUsd:0,slug:null,numberOfPages:0,isOpenForSubmission:!0,hash:"0abf2a59ee63fc1ba4fb64d77c9b1be7",bookSignature:"Dr. Eusebio Cano Carmona, Dr. Ricardo Quinto Canas, Dr. Ana Cano Ortiz and Dr. Carmelo Maria Musarella",publishedDate:null,coverURL:"https://cdn.intechopen.com/books/images_new/9662.jpg",keywords:"Climatic Factors, Bioclimate, Thermotype, Flora, Conservation, Phytocenosis, Plant Dynamics, Landscape, Cartography, Vegetation Series, Crops, Reforestation",numberOfDownloads:null,numberOfWosCitations:0,numberOfCrossrefCitations:null,numberOfDimensionsCitations:null,numberOfTotalCitations:null,isAvailableForWebshopOrdering:!0,dateEndFirstStepPublish:"November 23rd 2020",dateEndSecondStepPublish:"January 25th 2021",dateEndThirdStepPublish:"March 26th 2021",dateEndFourthStepPublish:"June 14th 2021",dateEndFifthStepPublish:"August 13th 2021",remainingDaysToSecondStep:"a month",secondStepPassed:!0,currentStepOfPublishingProcess:3,editedByType:null,kuFlag:!1,biosketch:"Dr. Cano Carmona and colleagues have directed 12 doctoral theses and more than 200 publications among articles, books, and book chapters. He has participated in national and international congresses with about 250 papers. He has held a number of different academic positions, including Dean of the Faculty of Experimental Sciences at the University of Jaen, Spain, and founder and director of the International Seminar on Management and Conservation of Biodiversity.",coeditorOneBiosketch:"Ricardo Jorge Quinto Canas is currently an Invited Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Sciences and Technology at the University of Algarve – Portugal, and a member of the Centre of Marine Sciences (CCMAR), University of Algarve. His current research projects focus on Botany, Vegetation Science (Geobotany), Biogeography, Plant Ecology, and Biology Conservation, aiming to support Nature Conservation.",coeditorTwoBiosketch:"Ana Cano Ortiz's fundamental line of research is related to botanical bioindicators. She has worked in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Central America. It presents more than one hundred works published in various national and international journals, as well as books and book chapters; and has presented a hundred papers to national and international congresses.",coeditorThreeBiosketch:"Carmelo Maria Musarella is a biologist, specialized in Plant Biology. He is a member of the permanent scientific committee of the International Seminar on “Biodiversity Conservation and Management” guested by several European universities. 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Her research focus is related to botanical bioindicators.\nDr. Ortiz has worked in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Central America. She has published more than 100 works in various national\nand international journals, as well as books and book chapters.\nShe has also presented a great number of papers/communications to national and\ninternational congresses.",institutionString:"University of Jaén",position:null,outsideEditionCount:0,totalCites:0,totalAuthoredChapters:"6",totalChapterViews:"0",totalEditedBooks:"0",institution:{name:"University of Jaén",institutionURL:null,country:{name:"Spain"}}},coeditorThree:{id:"276295",title:"Dr.",name:"Carmelo Maria",middleName:null,surname:"Musarella",slug:"carmelo-maria-musarella",fullName:"Carmelo Maria Musarella",profilePictureURL:"https://mts.intechopen.com/storage/users/276295/images/system/276295.jpg",biography:"Carmelo Maria Musarella, PhD (Reggio Calabria, Italy –\n23/01/1975) is a biologist, specializing in plant biology. He\nstudied and worked in several European Universities: Messina,\nCatania, Reggio Calabria, Rome (Italy), Valencia, Jaén, Almeria\n(Spain), and Evora (Portugal). He was the Adjunct Professor\nof Plant Biology at the “Mediterranea” University of Reggio\nCalabria (Italy). His research topics are: floristic, vegetation,\nhabitat, biogeography, taxonomy, ethnobotany, endemisms, alien species, and\nbiodiversity conservation. He has authored many research articles published in\nindexed journals and books. He has been the guest editor for Plant Biosystems and a\nreferee for this same journal and others. He is a member of the permanent scientific\ncommittee of International Seminar on “Biodiversity Conservation and Management”, which includes several European universities. 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Venkateswarlu",coverURL:"https://cdn.intechopen.com/books/images_new/371.jpg",editedByType:"Edited by",editors:[{id:"58592",title:"Dr.",name:"Arun",surname:"Shanker",slug:"arun-shanker",fullName:"Arun Shanker"}],productType:{id:"1",chapterContentType:"chapter",authoredCaption:"Edited by"}},{type:"book",id:"878",title:"Phytochemicals",subtitle:"A Global Perspective of Their Role in Nutrition and Health",isOpenForSubmission:!1,hash:"ec77671f63975ef2d16192897deb6835",slug:"phytochemicals-a-global-perspective-of-their-role-in-nutrition-and-health",bookSignature:"Venketeshwer Rao",coverURL:"https://cdn.intechopen.com/books/images_new/878.jpg",editedByType:"Edited by",editors:[{id:"82663",title:"Dr.",name:"Venketeshwer",surname:"Rao",slug:"venketeshwer-rao",fullName:"Venketeshwer Rao"}],productType:{id:"1",chapterContentType:"chapter",authoredCaption:"Edited by"}}]},chapter:{item:{type:"chapter",id:"56594",title:"Balance Sheets of Suffering in End-of-Life Care",doi:"10.5772/intechopen.70222",slug:"balance-sheets-of-suffering-in-end-of-life-care",body:'Every argument must generate a space in which it can be persuasive, valid, true, or right—a space in which it can be represented. These abstract spaces of representation [1] comprise a framing logic, produced data, conceptual structure, and explicit or implicit onto-epistemological and moral positions. They constitute, to use Mark Turner’s phrase, comprehensive hyper-blends [2], or to use Annemarie Mol and John Law’s expression, modes of ordering [3]. Several such comprehensive hyper-blends or modes of ordering may exist simultaneously, generating lines of friction, contention, and disagreement [3]. These spaces do not have to be invented de novo every time an argument is made. They are available as cultural, narrative, or discursive resources, that is, as collective templates that can be recruited and operated through blending with the particulars of situated arguments at hand.
Drawing on the recent work in cognitive linguistics [2, 4–8] and social studies of knowledge practices [1, 3], in this chapter, the various ways in which the figure of a balance sheet and its associated calculative devices frames arguments and positions in end-of-life care will be explored. Across arguments and positions, there are substantial differences in the kinds of matter that are balanced against each other and the values attributed to them, and which items are allowed as entries on the balance sheet and which are not.
The arguments about the balance sheets of suffering in end-of-life care that are being developed here are no exception to the requirement that they too need a space in which they can be persuasive, valid, or right. An important feature of “my space” is that it moves away from the long-held assumption that ontology, epistemology, and ethics constitute separate domains, toward a view that takes notions of embodied cognition and the performative nature of discursive-material practices as its point of departure. In the next section, we will make that “move” explicit, before introducing the notions of conceptual blending and modes of ordering. Following these introductory sections, the figure of the balance sheet as a space in which moral arguments are presented and weighed against each other is introduced. The most common currency on the balance sheets is human suffering. Comparing Norwegian and Dutch end-of-life care practices, the argument elaborates by looking at (a) the personal balance sheets of cancer patients, (b) the balance sheets of euthanasia, assisted suicide, and palliative sedation, and (c) the balance sheets that set patient´s right to self-determination up against health professional´s right to conscience. Finally, how the different ways in which the balance sheets are operated impact the level of constraints that the different end-of-life care policies put on patients and health professionals, and how they shape the material conditions of our dying are shown.
We still struggle with the legacy of long-held assumptions about the separateness of question of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. These assumptions operate through a range of fundamental distinctions, like the ones between body and mind, object and subject, is and ought, fact and value, and nature and culture. Science, often written in the singular, is about discovering matters of fact about a preexistent, natural, and material world, about which entities exist in the world, how they relate to each other, and how we can intervene to bring about change. On the other side of the divide, we locate the seat of self-governing (autonomous) subjects in the deep internal space of the human mind. Although we know from elementary human anatomy that there is no empty space in the skull, we have come to understand our-selves as inhabiting this private internal space. This nonmaterial space of the mind is coextensive with autobiographical consciousness and shaped by biography and experience [9]. This idea underlies the important humanist notions of personhood and human agency. I have called both psychology’s internal space of the human mind and the modern notion of the autonomous, human subject for irreal to express the ambiguousness in two senses in which we think about ourselves: (1) the sense that we are coextensive with our body, with the entailment that the “I” or “Self” ends with the disintegration of the body/brain, and (2) the sense that there is something more, something that is separate and distinct from our body/brain, an immaterial entity (soul?) that we perhaps hope will live on after death [10]. Obviously, this notion of the human subject is also a key concept in ethical reasoning. Autobiographical consciousness is the defining feature of what makes us living human beings. It is called autobiographical because it locates the current self in a temporal continuum of a lived past (memory functions) and an anticipated but open future (functions of planning and evaluation of alternative courses of action) [11]. The evolutionary emergence of autobiographical consciousness produced, most notably in humans, the awareness that we all, at some future time, will die. Memento mori! It also produced the anticipation of suffering that has not yet come to pass. Entities that have developed or have the potential to develop an autobiographical consciousness in their deep internal space are the subjects of ethical care, worthy of ethical and legal protection without discrimination by other human beings and society. The possession of that potential capacity is, in an essentialist understanding of medical ethics, necessary and sufficient to qualify for ethical and legal protection. A fully developed autobiographical consciousness provides its owner with the possibility of choice, subject to its own and society’s laws instead of the deterministic laws of nature. The laws of nature and the laws of man are separate matters.
Hence, we conceive of the deep, internal, private space of the individual mind as being coextensive with consciousness and with the operative agent doing the intending, willing, emoting, conceptualizing, and associating of concepts to language that we associate with thinking. It is the thinking that we do in this internal space, and of which we are consciously aware, that we have come to define reductively as human cognition. To define something is a process or activity of delineating, of tracing a boundary that simultaneously produces an inside and an outside, that what belongs and that which is excluded. Although produced in real time in the same brain, emotions and feelings have no place in what has become the epitome of human cognition: rational thinking and reasoning. This conception of the rational human subject not only disembodied cognition, displacing the body but also displaced emotions as a form of cognition, that is, as the human body’s principal biological valuation system. It is in such a “space of representation,” featuring a fundamental distinction between objective facts and subjective values, between reasoning and feeling, that traditional forms of medical-ethical reasoning gain traction; get the facts straight before moving on to sorting out the moral quandaries and dilemmas. It is such a space that makes the idea that end-of-life decision-making should be informed by medical knowledge about a patient’s disease, treatment possibilities, results, and prognoses seem persuasive and right.
Recent work in the neurosciences challenges the distinction between detached, rational reasoning occurring in the bark of the cerebral hemispheres (higher brain functions) and emotions generated in specialized, lower areas of the midbrain. Effectively, this work reclaims emotions for the appropriate understanding of all forms of biological, embodied cognition [11–13]. Embodied cognition biologists argue that cognition is a fundamental feature of biological life [14–16]. Cognition is a function that emerges with the formation of a living organism. Cognition is coextensive with the recursive sensorimotor loops of the embodied activity of living organisms. Life = embodied action = cognition. The repeated, recursive cycles of action and perception constitute an intentional arc. Intentionality is here conceived as an organism’s orientedness toward its socionatural environment. The Self is, in this view, the result of ongoing, here-and-now dynamic biological processes in a brain that is in continuous interaction with the body in which it is embedded and with the body’s physical and social environment. This is also the pre-position on which my own arguments in this paper are built: all judgments about the world, about human nature, and core human values are the products of cognitive recursive processes embedded in the bodies, brains, and activities of individuals and the recursive interactions among and practices of members of collectives. Damasio argues that the cognizing Self is “a perpetually recreated neurobiological state” [17]. Arguing along the same lines, we could say that the worlds of cognizing, meaning-making collectives are the emergent outcomes of perpetually recreated discursive-material practices [18]. Another way of saying this is that sciences do not represent a separate, pre-existent world, but that sciences conceived as collective sociomaterial practices perform the phenomena that make up the world we live and die in. They form, to use Latour’s term, our “modes of existence” [19]. Within such formations, there is no a priori separation between what is, what we know about what is, and what we value and care about. If there seem to be such fundamental distinctions, then they are the result of the work of philosophers (of science, of mind, etc.) being appropriated by scientists into the onto-epistemological foundation of their science. These processes can and should be studied empirically. The social study of “knowledge practices” is concerned with the ways sociomaterial “modes of ordering” come into being and with the power involved in that process. Multiple modes of ordering (plural) exist simultaneously; sometimes going comfortably together, giving rise to frictions and oppositions at other times and places [3].
Cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have long recognized the embodied nature of cognition [20–22]. Studying everyday and scientific language, they demonstrated that our understanding of the world, as it is expressed through language, is imbued with metaphorical imagery inferred from our embodied experience. The basic idea is that our embodied being and acting in the world provides the metaphorical schemas that constitute language and human understanding. An example is our basic understanding of causal relationships and human agency rooted in our embodied experience of pushing or moving objects around and observing the effects of that action. In a similar sense, our understanding of being emotionally moved is rooted in the experience of an outside force being applied to our bodies. We understand the passage of time metaphorically as a movement through space, a notion that is materially anchored in analogue clocks [23]. We may understand dying, a passage from one state into another, as involving a passage through space, a journey across the water and into the west, to undying lands, or from this earthly place full of suffering to a sacred, heavenly place of peace and tranquility where we will meet again those loved ones that passed before us. Death itself is often understood through militant metaphors as an enemy that must be fought off. But death may also be understood metaphorically as a welcome friend that saves us from further suffering in this world, or as a pre-emptive escape from the intolerable, meaningless, empty days ahead. The basic operation that a metaphor performs is one of mapping, of the transfer or projection of entities, processes and structure from a source domain to a target domain. Metaphorical schemas combine to build complex and abstract conceptual understandings.
Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner take Lakoff and Johnson’s work further and develop it into a theory of conceptual blending [2, 4–7]. Metaphorical mapping is only one form of conceptual blending. There are several more. Conceptual blending can be schematically presented by way of a minimal network that comprises at least three mental spaces: at least two input mental spaces and the blending space [2]. The input spaces selectively contribute or project structure and elements to the blended space in which these are integrated. Structure and elements that occupy analogous positions in the two input spaces, which in other words map between domains, may be compressed into identity and human scale. Conceptual blends can be elaborated by further blending with input spaces that already are blends. Biologists, for example, have blended the evolutionary history of life on earth with the developmental history of an individual from conception to birth and into adulthood, giving rise to the (problematic) idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny [24]. Neuroscientists have blended the sequential emergence in biological organisms of what Damasio calls a proto-, core- and autobiographical-consciousness with the macroanatomy of the brain, associating proto-consciousness with the brainstem—that we share with animals, core consciousness with the midbrain—that we share with closer animal relatives that we assume not to be self-conscious yet, and specifically human autobiographical consciousness with the phylogenetically newest neocortex of the large hemispheres [10, 11].
In many instances of conceptual blending, one or more of the input spaces is already a blended space. Mark Turner calls the blends that result from blending spaces that already are blends for hyper-blends. Many of our most treasured ideas concerning human beings are hyper-blends, like the notion of an autonomous human agent inhabiting a nonmaterial deep internal space inside our skull. In conceptual blending theory, it is not only analogies and similarities that matter, but dis-analogies are also important, including their either problematic or productive entailments. The notion of brain death, for example, is a hyper-blend, blending the idea of the legally certified death of a person with diagnostic procedures proving in a warm, breathing, and heart-beating body that the brain is irreversibly damaged. The dis-analogies between common notions and experiences of a dead person (as cold, nonbreathing, and with no puls) and the warm, heart-beating brain dead patient can be hard to accommodate for next of kin. The productive entailment of the brain death hyper-blend is that good quality donor-organs can legally be extirpated for transplantation purposes without running the risk of being prosecuted for murder.
Furthermore, conceptual blending is conducive to counterfactual reasoning. The input spaces to a blend do not have to factually exist. They may be counterfactual. In some cases, the counterfactual space does not even carry with it the suggestion that it might be possible. In many other cases, the counterfactual space implies a state or a scenario that may be possible but that has not yet come to pass. In the chronological/biological age hyper-blend, the discrepancy between a person’s biological age—calculated by measuring biological indicators of aging—and chronological age entails a counterfactual scenario of premature death. The responsible self-management of modifiable risk factors can prevent this scenario. The premature death scenario will remain counterfactual unless you take care, take responsibility for your own health. The point is not that the blend is a “possible world” or a true representation of the world, but that the blend suggests alternative ways of engaging with the world, and whose primary responsibility that is.
The power a particular hyper-blend can hold over people, fueling its own protection and the rejection of alternatives, should not be underestimated. Apparently, this is the case when deeply engrained beliefs about our own human nature, living and dying are challenged. Conceptual blending is not just some language game that we can enter into and get out of at will. Conceptual blending is part and parcel of the discursive-material practices that are constitutive for and order the world in which we live. We live in the blend! But neither should we neglect the contingency, multiplicity, diversity, and simultaneous coexistence of different modes of ordering life and the world, and how they relate to and interfere with each other. “For,” Mol and Law argue, “the various modes of ordering, logics, styles, practices, and the realities they perform do not exist in isolation from one another … They are not islands unto themselves, closed cultures, self-contained paradigms, or bubbles. [T]hey interfere with one another and reveal … partial connections.” “Often,” Mol and Law continue, “it is not so much a matter of living in a single mode of ordering or of ‘choosing’ between them. Rather it is that we find ourselves at places where these modes join. Somewhere in the interferences something crucial happens … complexity is created, emerging where various modes of ordering (styles, logics) come together and add up comfortably or in tension, or both” [3].
As an embodied cognitive operation, judging is a matter of balancing and of weighing one against the other. Take one object in your left hand and a second object in your right hand: Which one weighs the most? This idea of judgment as a balancing act is materially anchored in the weighing instrument called a balance. We also use balancing in the sense of re-balancing, of re-establishing equality of “weight” between two entities when that balance has been disturbed. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth! The proportional retribution balances the harm received. Justice is done. Justice is re-established. The image of the balance has been blended into the iconography of our legal system, together with the blindfold (impartiality) and the sword (punishment, retribution).
In economic practices, the blend of the balance has been elaborated with calculative features. The balance sheet is an archetypical space designed for the display and calculation of proportional relationships between costs and benefits, gains and losses, debts and possessions, and debit and credit. Balance sheets allow for forms of what Winther-Jørgensen calls for strong calculation, that is, forms of calculation where the end result can be expressed as a numerical number [25]. The numerical values in which judgments based on strong calculations are expressed have strong appeal for policy makers and politicians. However, not all forms of balance sheet calculation are strong. Many are weak. Moral judgments are often of this kind. The familiar expression “on the balance of it”—followed by a decision or conclusion, that is a judgment—is a marker of some form of preceding calculation, strong or weak, that involves the weighing of factual states and counterfactual possibilities, probabilities, and proportionalities, against each other.
Foster provides a telling example of how the balance sheet is used in moral reasoning and judgment [26]. The case is one in which there is a dispute about what is in the patient’s best interest. Some cases go to court. In a legal setting, Foster explains: “If it is to mean anything – if it is to be real – it has to be procedurally entrenched” [26]. The reasoning goes like this:
Human life is sacred. A corollary of that is that it must be a presumption that it is in the patient’s best interest to continue to live.
The presumption can be rebutted.
What is required to rebut is evidence that continued existence would be intolerable (the so-called intolerability test).
An appellate court judge explains how such an intolerability test should be executed. The first instance judge with the responsibility to make an evaluation of the best interest of the claimant lacking capacity should draw up a balance sheet. The first entrance should be any factor or factors of actual benefit. Then on the other sheet, the judge should write any counter-balancing dis-benefits to the applicant. Then the judge should enter on each sheet the potential gains and losses in each instance making some estimate of the extent of the possibility that the gain or loss might accrue. At the end of the exercise the judge should be better placed to strike a balance between the sum of the certain and possible gains against the sum of the certain and possible losses. Obviously, only if the account is in relatively significant credit will the judge conclude that the application is likely to advance the best interest of the claimant [26] (my italics).
In the case of the intolerability test, the judge who performs the calculations in the balance sheet cannot do this on the basis of events that have already been experienced, but he must to a large extent rely on estimates of counterfactual events and experiences that have not yet come to pass. Furthermore, there may be limitations on what kinds of suffering or relief can enter the calculation.
Suffering is a common currency on the costs side of end-of-life balance sheets. On the other benefits side of the balance sheet, suffering is balanced by more time of life, but not at any cost. The balance sheet can be a seriously ill or dying person’s personal dilemma to figure out what to do and how to proceed. Think of a patient with an advanced form of cancer. This is the familiar quandary that follows from the uncertainty that you cannot know in advance whether the extra time of life that life-prolonging treatment will give has a quality of life that is worth living. Do the good days on which you have time to live outweigh the bad days that are filled with suffering? Shall I accept the offer of life-prolonging treatment at the cost of prolonged suffering? Or shall I accept that death is imminent and use the time left to settle my affairs and say farewell to next of kin and loved ones?
One gets the impression that the expected answer is obvious: Of course, you must choose for more time of life, to be with your partner, to see your children grow up and hold a newborn grandchild in your arms. But is this choice so obvious?
In affluent countries with advanced health care systems, cancer treatment has been centralized in cancer clinics associated with university hospitals, combining research and teaching with treatment and patient care. In these hospitals, clinicians also hold research and teaching positions in the associated university. Through their professional organizations, these professors in oncology may be involved in the elaboration of professional guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of particular forms of cancer. Many patients attending the clinic for diagnostics and treatment are enrolled in research protocols that are part of international, collaborative multicenter studies [27]. Today, these studies do not compare cancer treatment with the natural course of the disease under nontreatment. They compare slightly different multimodal treatment options with already existing ones. The by far most important effect variable is survival in one or other form, as duration of remission, mean time to relapse, or mean time to death. In these centers, quite aggressive treatments of even advanced stages of cancer have become the default treatment option offered to patients. “We will fight together!” one patient information brochure exclaims, suggesting simultaneously an expectation that the patient also fights her cancer [28]. There is a particular notion of courage here. The kind of courage the patient must muster to suffer through the ordeals of surgical, radiation, and chemotherapy to win more time of life to spend with her children and spouse, and to help medicine become better at treating cancer and, hence, safe future lives. Cancer centers are in the business of adding and maximizing survival. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the alternative, accepting that death is imminent and entering into a palliative trajectory, requiring a different kind of courage, is not always offered to patients in these centers [28].
Aggressive treatment and refusing life-prolonging treatment are two different trajectories that exhibit path dependency. Once you have entered into one or the other, it is difficult to go back. The suffering endured under treatment is the investment a patient must make to gain more time of life. To make it worthwhile, the good days must balance the bad days. When bad days outnumber good days, counting and summarizing days of each kind will not be sufficient. It may be necessary to increase the value of each good day, of each moment with your children or grandchildren to make the sum of them balance out and surpass the costs.
We should, furthermore, consider to what extent the treatment regime contributes to an increase of suffering. As diagnostic technologies make it possible to achieve the goal of early and even presymptomatic diagnosis of cancers, the suffering a patient endures is induced to an increasing degree by the treatment. Much of the suffering is iatrogenic and not caused by the disease.
Keating and Cambrioso argue that the evolution and history of cancer after the Second World War is the evolution of the disease under specific treatment regimens. It is a treatment history rather than a “natural history” [27]. Systemic cancer treatment intervenes in the biology of the disease. Today, it is more apparent than ever that cancer is not only a clonal disease, meaning that the origin of cancer cells can be traced back to a first, single cancerous ancestral cell that, having acquired the capacity of limitless cell division, gives rise to limitless numbers of descendants. Cancer is also adaptive. Or as Mukherjee puts it, cancer is a clonally evolving disease [29]. Due to some degree of genetic instability, every generation of cancer cells creates a small number of cells that are genetically different from their parents. With each volley of chemotherapeutic drugs that does not kill all cancer cells, a few mutant clones that can resist the assault grow out. In Mukherjee’s clonal selection cancer blend, blending the course of a disease in a patient with the evolutionary history of life forms on earth, “[t]his mirthless, relentless cycle of mutation, selection and overgrowth generates cells that are more and more adapted to survival and growth … Cancer thus exploits the fundamental logic of evolution unlike any other illness. If we, as a species, are the ultimate product of Darwinian selection, then so, too, is this incredible disease that lurks inside us” [29]. In a sense, the “war on cancer” is a war on life itself.
Cancer treatment regimens coproduce the disease phases of remission and relapse. As the apparatus of collaborative groups matured, clinical trials targeted specific disease phases: trials for initial treatment, trials for first remission, trials for relapse, and so on. The disease at relapse was no longer the same as the disease initially diagnosed, requiring new drugs or new drug combinations. Without chemotherapeutic treatment regimens, these phases would not exist.
For the individual patient, cancer treatment regimens produce the protracted courses of disease, including the harm done to patients as a result of the “all-out assault” nature of the treatment that so many present-day cancer patients go through. The suffering caused by the treatment can be far greater and protracted than the suffering caused by the disease itself. It is a high price patients pay.
The figure of the balance sheet of suffering is also apparent in arguments policing the distinction between euthanasia and assisted suicide on one hand and palliative sedation on the other [30]. These are arguments not only about the implications of the intolerability of suffering but also about what kind of items are allowed onto the balance sheet and which are not.
Palliative sedation is described as the intentional pharmacological reduction of the patient’s consciousness with the aim to reduce intolerable suffering from intractable physical symptoms that cannot be managed otherwise. Palliative sedation until death is considered to be a last-resort option. Proponents of palliative sedation in end-of-life care take great care to present palliative sedation as an ordinary, medical treatment that is different in kind from euthanasia.
Palliative sedation is provided with the intention to relief suffering, with an explicit focus on the intention with which the treatment is given. Often within the same sentence, under the same breath, it is added that the intention is not to hasten death. We encounter this figure in many variations. Of course, in this blend, the intent to hasten death would be equivalent to euthanasia or physician assisted suicide. The blend is further elaborated by blending with moral or legal positions. Depending on one’s moral conviction or on the jurisdiction in which one works, hastening a patient’s death would be equivalent with murder. An international panel of expert clinicians reviewing the literature on palliative sedation in the last weeks of life concluded that The decision to offer sedation to relieve intolerable suffering during the last weeks of life presents no distinct ethical problem, provided that there is no intention to hasten death. It is distinct from euthanasia because (a) it has the intention to provide symptom relief, (b) it is a proportionate intervention and (c) the death of the patient is not a criterion for the success of the treatment [31] (my emphasis).
In medical treatment, there is always a risk of detrimental effects, but these are unintended side effects. In one general medical or pharmacological sense, proportionality refers to the due care requirement that the level of sedation should not be deeper than is necessary to alleviate distress and suffering. When mild sedation (somnolence; a form of reduction of consciousness from which one can be aroused through appropriate forms of stimulation) achieves the intended result, then one should not aim for deep sedation (from which one cannot be aroused) [31]. In end-of-life care, severe anxiety is treated with sedatives from the same family of substances as those used in palliative sedation. Proportionality of anxiety treatment may require a dosage to be increased to levels where reduction of consciousness occurs as an unintended side effect. However, when the intention was not to expressly produce unconsciousness, or so the argument goes, this would not constitute palliative sedation.
When intentions cause actions, the reverse should also apply, that is, that intentions can be backtracked from the records in which action patterns and the traces that these leave behind are documented. The intention of PST [= Palliative Sedation Treatment] can be assessed by the proportionality … of the action. Intent may be judged by looking at the drug record. Repeated doses, titrated to ease an individual’s distress, are the mark of proportionated sedation. Single large doses are the mark of ignorance and intentional harm [31] (my emphasis).
Cases in which there is a covert intention to hasten death through high dosages of sedatives constitute “covert euthanasia” or “euthanasia by stealth” (relief of suffering by death). The words “covert” and “stealth” place these ways of doing end-of-life care on the wrong side of the border, morally and legally. Future suffering relieved or prevented by death is not allowed on the benefit side of this balance sheet of suffering.
The Norwegian guidelines for palliative sedation to the dying, published in 2001 by the Norwegian Medical Association, provide a telling example of how suffering relieved by death is excluded from the balance sheet [32]. Against the claim that euthanasia contributes to the relief of suffering, the Norwegian guidelines for palliative sedation to the dying argue that suffering belongs to life and life experience. Talk about the absence or relief of something that belongs to life is meaningless when the patient is dead. … A sedated patient is without suffering, but simultaneously with life experience. Yet, it makes sense to say that suffering has been relieved, because the patient still lives and can be woken again. [32]
At least the potential for life experience is still present. The Norwegian guidelines dismiss the counterfactual argument that says that “not-living-anymore” will stop further suffering from occurring, although this is, in another blend, obviously true.
In Norway, suffering that has been prevented by the patient’s death is inadmissible as an entry into the balance sheet of human suffering. Positions on ethical, legal, and medical issues, on probabilities and causal relationships have been crafted together in a coherent framework that both shapes and restricts choices available to dying patients and next-of-kin?
Contrary to Norway, the Netherlands have carved out another path that goes deeper into the borderland of life and death. Historically, the Dutch physicians who, together with their patients, pioneered the practice of euthanasia in the Netherlands defended their actions with an appeal to the appeal the patients’ suffering made on their moral duty to not abandon but to help them [33]. The Netherlands allow patients to ask for more active termination of life to prevent suffering, simultaneously allowing physicians to grant such a request when they perceive it their never easy duty to provide assistance in dying when live can no longer be saved or prolonged. Suffering prevented by death is allowed as an entry on the benefit side of the end-of-life balance sheet. Safeguards marking that path, that is subject to the Dutch Penal Code, in the form of due care requirements, are consequently tougher than those for palliative sedation. These due care requirements include a second opinion by another physician, compulsory notification of each case to a review committee, and in each case a decision of exemption from prosecution and punishment. “The offence … shall not be punishable if it has been committed by a physician who has met the requirements of due care …” (Article 293 of the Dutch Penal Code, as amended by the law of 2001) [33].
It is possible to specify the differences between items allowed to be entered on the balance sheet even further. In Norway, euthanasia and assisted suicide are illegal. But even in its guidelines for palliative sedation in end-of-life care the Norwegian Medical Association is very restrictive. In its 2001 guidelines, it is only intolerable and refractory physical symptoms that can provide a proper medical indication for the intended, proportional pharmaceutical reduction of the patient’s consciousness, and therewith life experience. Mental symptoms are not allowed on that balance sheet [32]. The Norwegian Medical Association revised its guidelines for palliative sedation in 2014 [34]. It maintains its position that palliative sedation is a last-resort option; a treatment that, although ordinary and legal, should only be given in exceptional cases of intolerable suffering resulting from or dominated by physical symptoms. However, the 2014 guidelines provide a small opening toward mental suffering by stating that “psychological symptoms alone are only in rare cases indication for palliative sedation” [34]. In a paper in the Medical Association’s journal, these psychological symptoms are specified as “serious and treatment refractory psychological symptoms and delirium with extreme unrest and confusion, provided that first an attempt has been made to correct pathophysiolocal causes” [35]. These are mental symptoms associated with the process of dying.
The Dutch law regulating euthanasia and assisted suicide makes no distinction between physical and mental suffering, including suffering from psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar disease. There is recognition that the mental suffering from psychiatric conditions over long time, and without the prospect of improvement, can induce in patients the wish to die. Dutch law has made it possible for these patients to ask for and receive professional help in ending their lives on request, provided proper procedures and due care requirements are followed.
Starting in the early 1990s, in the Netherlands, there is currently an ongoing discussion about the question whether the kind of suffering that should be allowed as entries on the balance sheet should be expanded beyond psychiatric conditions to include suffering from life. In 2010, a group of publicly well-known former politicians, physicians, university professors, journalists, and artists established the Out of Free Will civil initiative, Uit Vrije Wil, working toward the legalization of professional help to die for people of old age who consider their live completed [36]. The people this concerns are people who have reached respectable ages of 75 or older and who have developed a sustained wish to die. They do not want to have to keep on living a life that has become meaningless and without prospect. They may or may not suffer from the accumulated physical symptoms of common ailments that come with old age, but that is not the source of their wish to die. The reasons they give for their wish to die vary but have often to do with the loss of next of kin and spouses; the feeling of not being needed anymore after having lived an active and fruitful life, of being sidelined by society; a fear of loosing their independence; of becoming dependent on others; the lack of meaningful everyday life activities. Life itself, or better, the prospect of living through the many empty and meaningless days ahead has become the source of a kind of existential suffering [37]. Some of them still have a partner they live with or adult children with families, and they enjoy spending time with them. But on the balance of it, these moments do not outweigh the burden they suffer from having lost the prospect of a meaningful future. They are, to use Wijngaarden´s phrase, “incurably old.”
The issue of legalization of professional help to die to old age people who consider their life completed was brought up in parliament during the 2014 evaluation of the Dutch law on euthanasia and assisted suicide. The government commissioned an advisory report on the issue from a group of experts. The committee concluded that the extant legal framework already provides sufficient possibilities for this presumably small group of people. Hence, it is not advisable to allow, with regard to assisted suicide, more freedom to emerge than is already provided by the current legal framework [38]. Despite this conclusion, in the year preceding the parliamentary elections of March 2017, several liberal parties expressed their support for an expansion of the law and include the suffering from having to live on as a legitimate ground for asking but also receiving professional help in ending one’s life. In 2016, member of parliament for the liberal democratic party D´66, Pia Dijkstra, prepared and submitted a bill to this effect, arguing that the freedom of every citizen to shape and live their lives in accordance with their own preferences also includes decisions concerning the final phase and the end of life. Everyone has the right to leave this life, or conversely, no one is obliged to keep on living [39]. Forcing someone to continue living a life that has become meaningless not only violates this person’s right to self-determination, but it also constitutes a form of harm. It should not be a crime to help!
It is uncertain whether the bill will pass the next parliament, and of course, there is an opposition, not only from religious parties in parliament but also from mental health professionals, arguing that these people are mentally ill, suffering from a detachment syndrome. They should receive treatment not be given assistance to die.
In the previous sections, a different type of balance sheet has been lurking: the balance sheet that sets up and weighs the patient’s right to self-determination against health professional’s right to conscience.
The Norwegian 2001 guidelines on palliative sedation to the dying explicitly require proportionality between the severity of the patient’s suffering and the moral gravity of the demand put to a physician. To ask a physician to collaborate in the permanent reduction of a patient’s consciousness, and therewith life experience, is of such significance that this can only be requested in cases where the patient’s suffering is of equal magnitude [30, 32].
The concern for health professionals’ right to conscience is also evident in these and other guidelines’ preoccupation with the cause of death. Or rather, their preoccupation with avoiding that a palliative intervention can be perceived as a contributing causal factor to the death of the patient. After the patient’s death, it is the underlying disease that should stand alone as the cause of death. Graef and Dean wrote that “[t]he desired outcome of PST is symptom relief and a peaceful, quiet death by the natural course of the disease” [31] (my italics). Note that the causal relationship is signified by the word “by.” The agent causing death is the disease. Note also that the quote ignores that modern medicine has transformed the courses of many diseases through myriad of interventions and attempts to cure or delay the disease so that it is no longer possible to talk about the natural course of a disease. To a large extent, modern medicine has chronified the diseases it cannot cure [40]. The word “natural” must here be understood in opposition to artificial or “caused by a medical intervention.” On the question whether palliative sedation has an impact on the exact time of death, Dutch guidelines conclude that, when administered proportionally, palliative sedation does not hasten death. The Norwegian guidelines are not satisfied with the level of evidence for this conclusion and argue that “even though it is claimed that palliative sedation does not foreshorten life, it can never be completely ruled out that a patient dies as a result of the sedation.” The risk of this happening increases proportionally with the time the patient spends in an unconscious or sedated condition [32].
Both the patient and the doctor or the nurse have a right to autonomy and self-determination that derives from the same Universal Declaration of Human Rights concerning the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. So, on the balance of it, whose autonomy shall carry the most weight in end-of-life decision making?
The same figure of the balance sheet of suffering and human rights is used in both countries, but it is operated quite differently. Norway is the more restrictive of the two countries, at least in its policy documents, laws, and professional guidelines. It puts more constraints on both dying patients and physicians and other health professionals. The Netherlands have developed more generous end-of-life care practices, allowing patients to ask for more active termination of life at the patient’s explicit and sustained request.
The notion of constraints can be understood in two different ways. A common understanding of a constraint is that of a prohibition, an arrangement that aims to prevent something from happening. The other understanding of a constraint puts emphasis on the channeling effects of constraints, the way in which a dam in a river, for example, channels the water current into a tube to produce hydropower energy. Or the ways in which environmental constraints can channel the direction of emergent biological forms (volleys of chemotherapy impacting the biology of the cancer; the wide spread use of antibiotics producing multiresistant bacteria). Could the strong emphasis on the sanctity of life in palliative end-of-life care in fact increase the amount and duration of suffering in dying patients? Of course, this is a question that is difficult to answer. But, I will argue, there are indications that this might be the case.
One reason is apparent in the definitions that palliative sedation has received in Norwegian guidelines. As a last resort option, palliative sedation is defined as the intentional, pharmacological reduction of the patient’s consciousness with the aim to reduce intolerable suffering from intractable physical symptoms that cannot be managed otherwise. Suffering from intractable physical symptoms is a proper medical indication. Suffering from psychiatric condition is not allowed onto the Norwegian balance sheet of suffering. Depending on the degree of physicians’ compliance with these professional guidelines one can argue that there may be suffering that is addressed too late, and perhaps insufficiently out of fear for being accused of euthanasia.
When definitions of palliative care are provided, the definition is more often than not followed, under the same breath, by the reassurance that palliative care/palliation does not hasten death nor prolong it. As a factual statement, this must be false. Palliative treatment affects the temporal dimensions of dying. However, the evaluation of a palliative treatment’s effect on the timing of death is different depending on its direction, whether the process of dying is accelerated or delayed. Even a small change toward an earlier death is viewed with suspicion, because the intention of palliative care is not to hasten death or relief suffering by death. At the end of the day, it is the underlying disease, and it alone, that must stand out as the agent responsible for the death of the patient. Unfortunately, this preoccupation with avoiding that acts of care can be construed as causal co-factors to the death of a dying patient induces uncertainty, anxiety, and feelings of guilt in both health professionals and next of kin. A shift in the timing of death in the other direction, delaying the process of dying, is valued differently, because it gives the patient more time and more life experience. However, more time as a result of palliative treatment also allows the erosion of body and mind to become deeper before death finally arrives.
In many western countries with highly developed health care systems, the law of the land has delegated the competence to make end-of-life care decisions to physicians, based on the assumption that these are medical decisions that require knowledge and expertise about treatment possibilities, documented results, and prognosis. The medical-professional literature describes the point at which life-prolonging treatment is no longer possible and its transition into a palliative trajectory as a medical assessment and decision. Despite the fact that respect for the patient’s autonomy is first among the four principles of medical ethics, in practice, our autonomy is constrained at a time when it perhaps matters most, at the time of our dying [10]. I am not advocating that patients facing death “put in the oars”—as the Norwegian saying goes—too early. When they do, they may spend a long time waiting for death. However, I would support people reclaiming important aspects of end-of-life decision making from medicine, give priority to their own versions of the balance sheet of their lives and values, and achieve or maintain a greater degree of direction over the manner, place, and timing of death.
The article processing charges for this chapter have been funded by a grant from the open access publication fund of UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
Chemical engineering deals with the conversion of raw material into products via a chemical unit process or unit operations. Manufacturing of various chemicals like esters, ethers, cumene, petroleum processing unit, etc. required a reactor followed by separator such as a distillation unit to separate the required product from other constituents on the basis of relative volatility [1]. There are various constraints on this type of processing like more space required for the installation of the unit, higher cost, more energy input requirement, and reduced selectivity. Specifically the conversion limits for reversible reactions are difficult to overcome toward highest purity of product because once the equilibrium is achieved in the system, no more reactant will be converted into products. In view of all these constraints, reactive distillation emerged as a novel technique of process intensification in which reaction and separation of product take place simultaneously in a single column [2].
\nIn the case of reactive distillation, total capital cost is reduced due to two combined process steps held in the single unit. This kind of integration is also beneficial in reducing pump cost and other instrumentation cost. The saving in total energy cost is due to exothermic nature of many chemical reactions which in turn are beneficial in providing heat for separation of components simultaneously [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. The schematic diagram of reactive distillation column is shown in Figure 1.
\nSchematic diagram of reactive distillation column (RDC).
Reactive distillation, which uses heterogeneous catalysts known as catalytic distillation, was firstly considered for RD [11], but it then remained uninvestigated and lacked research interests until the 1980s. However in 1980, with the advent of reactive distillation technology, Eastman Company tentatively carried out synthesis of high-purity methyl acetate. Later on RD was categorized as hybrid and non-hybrid columns [12, 13]. Hybrid RD is used to describe columns, which have separate reactive and separation sections, while the reaction takes place in the whole non-hybrid RD column.
\nAfter the success story of Eastman Company, several European countries and universities joined forces to work on a development strategy for reactive distillation process under the umbrella of Brite Euram project. Sulzer Chemtech has developed special structured catalytic packing for reactive distillation columns [14]. RD is an important method for many chemical syntheses which require recovery of chemicals such as recovery of acetic acid. RD uses cation-exchange resin for many liquid-phase homogeneous catalyst reactions such as butyl acetate synthesis and helps in separating catalyst during downstream processing. The investigation of many such reactions is reported [15, 16, 17]. Transesterification for synthesis and characterization of biodiesel from different raw material such as palm oil, mustard oil, etc. has been proposed but still not commercialized using various homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts. However, hydrodesulfurization of light oil fractions has been carried out commercially for diesel deep hydrodesulfurization.
\nCDTECH, the major commercial process technology provider, licensed up to now over 200 commercial-scale processes. Sulzer reports the commercial application of reactive distillation as synthesis of ethyl, methyl, and butyl acetate, hydrolysis of methyl acetate, synthesis of methylal, removal of methanol from formaldehyde, and formation of fatty acid esters. Commercial reactive distillation application with Katapak licensed from Sulzer is tabulated in Table 1.
\nProcess | \nIndustrial location | \n
---|---|
Synthesis of acetates | \nEurope | \n
Hydrolysis of methyl acetate | \nEurope and Asia | \n
Synthesis of methylal | \nEurope and Asia | \n
Removal of methanol from formaldehyde | \nEurope | \n
Fatty acid ester | \nAsia | \n
Commercial application of reactive distillation.
Reactive distillation (RD) is a hybrid combination of reaction and separation in a single vessel. The first patent for this process route was out in the 1920s, but little was carried out till 1980 by the Eastman Company who synthesized methyl acetate for the first time using this technique. The following reactions have shown potential for reactive distillation:
\nIn esterification reaction, alcohol and acid react to form an ester. Esters are chemical compounds having pleasant fruity odor.
\nThe main application of esters is in the synthesis of artificial flavor and essence and solvent for oil, gum, fat, and resins. They are also used as plasticizers. Esterification is the oldest reaction carried out in a reactive distillation column. For example, in conventional methyl acetate production, the yield of methyl acetate is low because of low boiling azeotrope formation. This constraint is removed in RD and almost pure methyl acetate can be collected. Fatty acid esters are natural chemicals used, among other things in cosmetics; plastics and surfactants were also reported to be synthesized in reactive distillation.
\nTransesterification reaction in general can be represented as the reaction between triglyceride and alcohol to produce alkyl esters and glycerol. The best example is a synthesis of biodiesel using transesterification. Commercially, no industrial unit has been reported on synthesis of biodiesel in RD, but the literature shows that pilot-scale synthesis is possible. This process occurs by reacting the vegetable oil with alcohol in the presence of an alkaline or acidic catalyst.
Heterogeneous catalysts are more effective from an economical point of view for biodiesel production. Sometimes transesterification can be a beneficial alternative to hydrolysis as it does not involve formation of water, and moreover, it brings out the value added through formation of another ester.
\nEtherification refers to the synthesis of ethers from alcohol and acid. Ethers are an indispensable part of the fuel industry as, like the properties of alcohol, ether also enhances the octane value of fuel when added in appropriate proportion. Several model reactions via RD such as MTBE, ETBE, and TAME have been studied since last two decades. These fuel oxygenates are formed by reaction of isobutylene with alcohol to give ether and water. However, another alternative is to react tert-amyl alcohol (TAA) with corresponding lower alcohol such as methanol or ethanol.
\nTransfer of alkyl group from one molecule to another is known as alkylation. Cumene and ethyl benzene are some examples which are synthesized using alkylation process. In this process alkanes, which are a part of paraffin compounds, are reacted with an aromatic compound which results in production of a high-quality fuel substitutes like cumene. These compounds are added to gasoline as a blend to improve its octane number, reduce the engine problems like gum deposits on oxidation, etc. High aviation fuel blends are produced using an alkylation process whose octane number is denoted by a performance number having a value of greater than 100. The catalytic alkylation method uses aluminum chloride and hydrochloric acid as catalyst to initiate the reaction between benzene and propylene.
\nIn an aldol condensation, an enolate ion reacts with a carbonyl compound to form a β-hydroxyaldehyde or β-hydroxyketone, followed by a dehydration to give a conjugated enone. By using reactive distillation (RD), one can improve the selectivity toward the intermediate or final product depending on the type of catalyst used and by continuously removing the desired product from the reaction zone.
Dehydration reaction simply means removal of water. This process is employed generally for glycerol to obtain acetol. This reaction is usually carried into the presence of various metallic catalysts like alumina, magnesium, ruthenium, nickel, platinum, palladium, copper, Raney nickel, etc. Single-stage and two-stage reactive distillation techniques are being employed, and special care is being taken to regenerate these catalysts as they are classified as precious and non-precious catalysts.
\nVarious processes thereby produce a by-product which is of other important industrial use. Like in the case of biodiesel manufacturing using methanol, we get a secondary by-product called glycerol. It is a very good raw material for the process called acetylating as in this process, especially when carried out in reactive distillation column, it is reported that about 99% conversion of glycerol into triacetin is observed. This triacetin acts as an additive in compression engine fuels and reduced the knocking in the engine.
\nIsomerization is a process in which one molecule is transformed into another molecule which has exactly the same atom, but they have different arrangements. A-isophorone and b-isophorone in spite of being isomers can be very well separated by reactive distillation as there is a large difference in their volatilities.
\nOligomerization is a chemical process that converts monomers to macromolecular complexes through a finite degree of polymerization. Oligomer esters and acid were hydrolyzed using RD technology, and the results were consistent with industrial literature.
\nProduct purity is an ultimate customer requirement. If these are not fulfilled or low-quality product is supplied to the customer, the expectation of the customer will not be fulfilled. For this reason, quality parameters need to be defined. These parameters are differing in different cases. For example, few quality indexes like physical and chemical characteristics of the product, medicinal effects, toxicity, and shelf life are required to be given in the case of pharmaceutical products. Quality indexes such as taste, nutritional properties, texture, etc. are important in the case of food products. Similarly for products from chemical processes, final composition or product purity as quality index is required.
\nSynthesis of various chemicals usually is carried out in a reactor which may or may not be followed by separator. Either the case may be choice of design variable is very important. The market value of overhead product or the bottom product relies on its purity. Also the need of any further treatment for enhancing the purity relies on the initial product composition. In view of this, the degree of freedom for the column should be zero; that means the number of variables should be the same or equal to the number of equations involved in modeling. For example for a distillation column, if a designer specifies reflux ratio or boil up ratio and a distillate rate, then there will be corresponding unique set of distillate and bottom composition with respect to a fixed feed flow rate.
\nVariability in the product purity is due to various factors including variable flow rate, reboiler heat duty, reflux rate, and temperature inside the column. These parameters can be controlled using various control techniques to meet final product specification requirement as per the market demand both for large market and small market.
\nVarious control techniques are available which can be suitably applied to get continuous controlled final product composition. Detailed process knowledge helps in control of such a nonlinear process. The control performance also affects plant processing rates and utility usage. Process control engineering helps in designing control loop system which helps in the control of multivariable system and the systems involved multiple inputs and multiple outputs.
\nA specification is the minimum requirement according to which a producer or service provider makes and delivers the product and service to the customer.
\nDesign and implementation of method of manufacture in actual plant condition permit to make product in the quickest and easiest way of manufacturing. These also require preparing manufacturing instructions, sequence of operations, and other procedures.
\nEverything that is required for manufacture must be selected, taking care that all the elements are capable of achieving the standard of quality demanded.
\nBenefits of reactive distillation include:
Increased speed of operation
Lower costs—reduced equipment use, reduced energy use, and handling being easy
Less waste and fewer by-products
Improved product quality—reducing opportunity for degradation because of less heat requirement
Modeling of RD column involves basic concept of distillation column carrying out reaction in a reactive zone in between the rectifying zone and stripping zone [18, 19, 20, 21]. Thus modeling can be represented by various balances for different zones of reactive distillation column. Non-equilibrium modeling was carried out for heterogeneous catalyzed packed RDC using first principle approach. The schematic view of heterogeneous packed RDC is shown in Figure 2.
\nSchematic diagram of packed RDC.
The basic assumptions for this model are as follows:
Constant relative volatility of the components
Constant liquid hold up in reactive zone, reboiler, and condenser
Assuming reactive zone to be a single stage
Negligible vapor holdup
Thorough mixing of vapor and liquid
Figure 3 gives flow of vapor and liquid over a plate/tray. As per the reaction of two reactants producing two products, component material balance for various sections of the column can be written as follows:
\nSchematic of a tray/plate.
1. Rectifying and stripping trays
\n2. Reactive trays
\n3. Feed trays
\n4. The net reaction rate for component j on tray n in the reactive zone is given by
\n5. Reflux drum
\n6. Column base
\n7. Due to exothermic reaction, the heat of reaction vaporizes some liquid in reactive section. Therefore, the vapor rate increases in the reactive trays, and the liquid rate decreases down through the reactive trays.
\n8. Vapor phase
\nwhere Vpi−1 is vapor entering the plate p, ypi−1 is the mole fraction of component i, and Pv is vapor added to the column, but these are leaving the column through condenser; therefore negative sign is considered, Vp is the vapor leaving the plate p, and nipv is gain of species i due to transport, i.e., mass transfer rates. It is given as.
\nwhere Nip is molar flux of species i at particular point in the two-phase dispersion.
\n9. Liquid phase
\nwhere Lpi+1 is liquid entering the plate p, xpi+1 is the mole fraction of component i, PLp is liquid added to the column, Lp is the liquid leaving the plate p, and nipl is loss of species i due to transport, i.e., mass transfer rates. It is given as.
\nwhere Nipl is molar flux of species i at particular point in the two-phase dispersion. Since there is no accumulation at phase interphase, it follows.
\nMt is the accumulation due to mass transfer.
\nThe experimental synthesis of methyl acetate esterification was performed in pilot-scale heterogeneous catalytic packed RDC shown in Figure 4. The characteristics of packed RDC are given in Table 2 and temperature data is given in Table 3. From the observations we conclude that the temperature of the reactive zone, from stage 3 to stage 6, lies between 50 and 70°C, which is an ideal condition for production of methyl acetate catalytic esterification reaction. The temperature of stripping zone lies between 50 and 59°C. Temperature of rectifying section lies between 30 and 45°C.
\nPilot-scale reactive distillation column.
Contents | \nCharacteristics and conditions | \n|
---|---|---|
No. of stages | \n10 including reboiler and condenser | \n|
Rectifying section | \n7–8 | \n|
Reactive section | \n3–6 | \n|
Stripping section | \n1–2 | \n|
Packing used | \nHYFLUX | \n|
Catalyst | \nAmberlyst-15 (Acidic ion-exchange) | \n|
Catalyst granularity | \n10–100 μm | \n|
Average particle diameter (m) | \n7.4 × 10−4 | \n|
Apparent density (g/cm3) | \n0.99 | \n|
Macro porosity of catalyst | \n0.32 | \n|
Condenser type | \nTotal condenser | \n|
Feed | \nMethanol | \nAcetic acid | \n
\n
| \n3 50°C Atmospheric 0.03 | \n6 50°C Atmospheric 0.03 | \n
Reflux ratio | \n5 | \n
Characteristics of packed reactive distillation column.
Time (min) | \nTemperature profile (°C) | \nPressure (mmHg) | \nReboiler temp (°C) | \n||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
T1 | \nT2 | \nT3 | \nT4 | \nT5 | \nT6 | \nT7 | \nT8 | \nP1 | \nP8 | \n||
10 | \n53 | \n52 | \n42 | \n43 | \n41 | \n36 | \n33 | \n22 | \n108 | \n280 | \n66 | \n
20 | \n52 | \n56 | \n49 | \n53 | \n51 | \n50 | \n42 | \n27 | \n138 | \n293 | \n66 | \n
30 | \n55 | \n57 | \n52 | \n55 | \n55 | \n51 | \n41 | \n30 | \n115 | \n270 | \n70 | \n
40 | \n56 | \n56 | \n54 | \n55 | \n61 | \n52 | \n42 | \n40 | \n115 | \n270 | \n70 | \n
50 | \n57 | \n55 | \n52 | \n56 | \n61 | \n52 | \n44 | \n41 | \n117 | \n272 | \n69 | \n
60 | \n56 | \n59 | \n55 | \n57 | \n68 | \n54 | \n43 | \n40 | \n138 | \n270 | \n72 | \n
70 | \n57 | \n58 | \n55 | \n56 | \n65 | \n52 | \n44 | \n40 | \n114 | \n273 | \n70 | \n
80 | \n58 | \n59 | \n56 | \n60 | \n64 | \n56 | \n45 | \n40 | \n115 | \n249 | \n66.4 | \n
90 | \n58 | \n59 | \n57 | \n60 | \n56 | \n57 | \n40 | \n41 | \n115 | \n249 | \n68 | \n
100 | \n56 | \n59 | \n55 | \n57 | \n60 | \n51 | \n44 | \n40 | \n169 | \n300 | \n70 | \n
110 | \n56 | \n55 | \n51 | \n55 | \n60 | \n48 | \n42 | \n40 | \n163 | \n295 | \n72 | \n
120 | \n56 | \n55 | \n51 | \n55 | \n60 | \n49 | \n43 | \n40 | \n163 | \n294 | \n72 | \n
Experimental results of methyl acetate synthesis.
We have set the reboiler temperature at 70°C which is close to boiling point of methanol. However it varies as the reaction proceeds. The composition of methyl acetate obtained experimentally is 96%. The pressure of the top stage varies between 108 and 163 mmHg and that of reboiler varies between 249 and 300 mmHg.
\nIt is obvious that the product composition continuously increases with respect to time and as soon as concentration of reactants decreases, the composition also decreases. For continuous process, continuous supply of reactants is required to maintain the product composition. The variation of composition with time is shown in Figure 5.
\nVariation in product composition WRT time.
Simulation and optimization are the act of obtaining the best result under given circumstances. Optimization can be defined as the process of finding the conditions that give the maximum or minimum value of a function. Process optimization is the discipline of adjusting a process so as to optimize some specified set of parameters without violating some constraints. The chemical industry has undergone significant changes during the past 25 years due to the increased cost of energy, increasingly stringent environmental regulations, and global competition in product pricing and quality. One of the most important engineering tools for addressing these issues is optimization. Modifications in plant design and operating procedures have been implemented to reduce costs and meet constraints, with an emphasis on improving efficiency and increasing profitability. Optimal operating conditions can be implemented via increased automation at the process, plant, and company levels, often called computer-integrated manufacturing. Computers and associated software make the necessary computations feasible and cost-effective [22, 23, 24, 25].
\nSteady-state simulation of methyl acetate esterification was carried out using Aspen Plus simulator. Radfrac module, NRTL property method, and other operating conditions such as feed condition, feed location, operating pressure, column configuration including number of stages and reaction stage, type of condenser, type of reboiler, and feed flow rate of the components used are specified in Aspen Plus environment. The specification and other results are included in Table 4. The simulation flow sheet is shown in Figure 6. The product purity is attaining a highest value at the top stage. The composition profile of the column is shown in Figure 7. As shown in figure, the maximum composition of product methyl acetate obtained is 95.4%. The amount of methanol and acetic acid is much lower at the top of the column; this indicates the complete consumption of reactants and formation of product.
\nParameters | \nValues | \n|
---|---|---|
No. of stages Reactive stage Rectifying stage Stripping stage | \n10, including reboiler and condenser 3–6 (reactive zone) 2–3 7–9 | \n|
Input condition | \nMethanol | \nAcetic acid | \n
Temperature Flow rate | \n50°C 0.03 L/min | \n70°C 0.05 L/min | \n
Reboiler heat duty | \n0.2 kW | \n|
Reflux ratio | \n5 | \n|
Condenser temperature | \n57.40°C | \n|
Distillate rate | \n10.56 mole/hr | \n|
Reflux rate | \n52.81 mole/hr | \n|
Reboiler temperature | \n62.66°C | \n|
Bottom rate | \n86.12 mole/hr | \n|
Boil up rate | \n23.62 mole/hr | \n|
Boil up Ratio | \n0.274 | \n
Input condition and result of RDC.
Flow sheet of methyl acetate RDC.
Composition profile of methyl acetate RDC.
The temperature profile of the column is shown in Figure 8. As shown in figure, we can clearly observe that the temperature of the reactive section is higher than the other section; this is because of the exothermic nature of the esterification reaction. Also, temperature of reboiler is higher than the temperature at condenser. As it can be observed from the figure, the condenser temperature which is 57.4°C is lower than reboiler temperature which is 62.7°C. The temperature of the reactive zone is varied between 61.3 and 77.8°C, making it compatible to the exothermic nature of the esterification reaction. The maximum temperature of the condenser during experiment was 58°C, and the temperature of the condenser obtained from Aspen Plus was 57.4°C, which shows good agreement between experimental and simulation results.
\nTemperature profile of methyl acetate RDC.
Reactive distillation exhibits multiple steady-state conditions throughout the operation. This is known as multiplicity of the process. There are two types of multiplicity; one is known as input multiplicity, and the other is known as output multiplicity. This is the condition in which column gives same output for the different sets of process condition. In this paper, we have studied input multiplicity, in which we obtained same output for different input conditions. To analyze the situation, we have performed sensitivity analysis in Aspen Plus simulator.
\nFor sensitivity analysis, we have first chosen molar flow of methyl acetate on the basis of heat duties whose lower and upper bounds are fixed as 1 and 3 kW, respectively. For the second case, we have calculated mass fraction of methyl acetate by setting the molar flow of acetic acid in feed in the range of 0.01–0.08 L/min. In the third case, we have calculated distillate flow rate by varying feed flow rate in the range of 0.01–0.08 L/min to calculate the distillate-to-feed ratio (D/F). Similarly we have also calculated bottom-to-feed ratio (B/F). The result curves are shown in Figures 9 and 10, respectively. A shown in Figure 9, we can observe that the flow rate of methyl acetate is increasing as heat duty is increasing and found the maximum flow rate to be 0.927 lbmol/hr. at heat duty of 6820 Btu/hr. Similarly, we can observe that in Figure 10, the variation in flow rate of acetic acid is observed WRT mole fraction of product methyl acetate. The maximum product fraction is observed as 95.2% at flow rate of 0.0872 cuft/hr. The effect of change in distillate-to-feed Ratio (D/F) and change in bottom-to-feed (B/F) ratio on composition was also observed. It was found that optimized distillate-to-feed (D/F) ratio obtained 0.6275 and optimized bottom-to-feed (B/F) ratio obtained 0.4238 to get maximum product purity.
\nSensitivity analysis based on reboiler heat duty.
Sensitivity analysis based on acid flow rate.
Model analysis tool under Aspen Plus simulation facilitates optimization of the reactive distillation column. In this analysis we defined mass fraction of methyl acetate as objective on the basis of standard volumetric flow rate of acetic acid to obtain the minimum product composition that can be achieved at the top of the column. Heat duty was defined as constraint with fixed values between 1 and 3 kW as lower and upper limits, respectively. After the optimization, we obtained 26.99% as the minimum composition of methyl acetate and 2 kW as the required optimized heat duty.
\nThe summary of optimization and sensitivity results obtained from Aspen Plus simulation is included in Table 5. The optimized value of reboiler heat duty obtained was 2 kW, and optimized reflux ratio obtained was 4.69. These values are close to the experimental values which again show good agreement between experimental and simulation studies. The optimized flow rate of methyl acetate obtained using reboiler heat duty as manipulated variable is 0.093 lbmol/hr., and optimized product fraction obtained using standard volumetric flow rate of acetic acid is 0.96. The sensitivity result curve for optimized flow rate and composition of methyl acetate is shown in Figure 11, and sensitivity result curve for variation in column temperature based on reflux flow is shown in Figure 12.
\nRow | \nCase I Variation in reboiler heat duty Btu/hr | \nOptimized flow rate of methyl acetate lbmol/hr | \nCase II Variation in volumetric flow rate of acetic acid, ft3/hr | \nOptimized product composition | \n
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | \n3412.14 | \n0.0549 | \n0.0211 | \n0.4808 | \n
2 | \n4170.39 | \n0.0637 | \n0.0376 | \n0.6776 | \n
3 | \n4928.64 | \n0.0723 | \n0.05414 | \n0.8070 | \n
4 | \n5686.90 | \n0.0807 | \n0.07062 | \n0.9011 | \n
5 | \n6445.15 | \n0.0888 | \n0.08710 | \n0.9522 | \n
6 | \n6824.28 | \n0.0926 | \n0.10358 | \n0.9596 | \n
7 | \n7203.41 | \n0.0920 | \n0.10594 | \n0.9604 | \n
8 | \n7961.66 | \n0.0904 | \n0.12006 | \n0.9643 | \n
9 | \n8719.91 | \n0.0902 | \n0.13655 | \n0.9676 | \n
10 | \n9478.17 | \n0.0900 | \n0.15303 | \n0.9700 | \n
11 | \n10236.42 | \n0.0893 | \n0.16951 | \n0.9719 | \n
Summary of the sensitivity and optimization results.
Sensitivity curve for optimized flow rate and composition.
Sensitivity curve for column temperature based on reflux ratio.
This chapter gives details of reactive distillation as effective unit for various synthesis and manufacturing. The detailed case study envisaged to produce methyl acetate using methanol and acetic acid in a pilot plant reactive distillation column. The operating conditions were maintained as feed temperature of 50°C, column pressure of 1 atmosphere, feed rate of 0.03 L/min, and initial reboiler temperature of 70°C. The experiment yielded high purity of methyl acetate. We have succeeded in obtaining 95% purity of methyl acetate. The experimentation was then followed by simulations so as to contrast the results. The Aspen Plus simulation gives methyl acetate purity of 91.1%. This was followed by validation of results using sensitivity and optimization analysis. The optimized value of reflux was obtained as 4.69 and required reboiler duty 2 kW. The sensitivity analysis registered distillation-to-feed (D/F) ratio as 0.6275 and bottom-to-feed (B/F) ratio 0.4235 to obtain maximum product purity. These encouraging results establish a good agreement between experimental and simulation studies.
\nstoichiometric coefficient
\nreaction rate on nth stage
\nliquid holdup on nth stage
\nforward reaction rate on nth stage
\nbackward reaction rate on nth stage
\nliquid composition on nth stage
\nflow rate of vapor on nth stage
\nflow rate of liquid on nth stage
\nheat of reaction
\nnet heat of vaporization
\ntotal number of stages
\ndistillate flow rate
\nbottoms flow rate
\nvapor composition on nth stage
\nreflux ratio
\nfeed flow rate on nth stage
\nfeed composition on nth stage
\npure component vapor pressure
\ntemperature at nth stage
\ntotal pressure
\nIntechOpen’s Academic Editors and Authors have received funding for their work through many well-known funders, including: the European Commission, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), CGIAR Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers, National Institute of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), German Research Foundation (DFG), Research Councils United Kingdom (RCUK), Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Australian Research Council (ARC).
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