Azeotropic distillation with reaction on tert-butyl alcohol dehydration to isobutylene

Bin Sun, Xing Fu Chen, Jian Guo Song, Ji Hai Tang, Zhao Yang Fei, Xian Chen, Mi Fen Cui, Xu Qiao

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Tert-butyl alcohol dehydration by azeotropic reactive distillation was studied through experiment and simulation, with cyclohexane and sulfonic acid resin as azeotropic agent and catalyst, respectively. The technical feasibility of isobutylene production from dehydration process was confirmed by the experiment. The kinetic subroutine was programmed and powered by Fortran, the azeotropic reactive distillation was simulated by Aspen Plus, and NRTL was used as thermodynamic model. The results were consistent well with the experimental data, indicating the practicability of the simulation method. Process parameters including cooler temperature, phase separation temperature, distillation stage number, boil-up flow rate, feed stage, and mass fraction of tert-butyl alcohol in feed stream were investigated. The optimized cooler and phase separation temperature was 2 ℃ and 50 ℃ respectively with tert-butyl alcohol flow rate 0.25 g/min, and 10 g catalyst, when the feed inlet was any one of 2-5 stage, the number of distillation stage was 6 and the boil-up flow rate was 3.0 g/min. Tert-butyl alcohol conversion reached over 96.00%, with the feed mass fraction of tert-butyl alcohol above 75% under the optimal conditions.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)21-25
Number of pages5
JournalHuaxue Gongcheng/Chemical Engineering (China)
Volume43
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Oct 2015

Keywords

  • Azeotropy
  • Dehydration
  • Reactive distillation
  • Tert-butyl alcohol

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