β Scribed by Dipl.-Ing. Kai Sundmacher; Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ulrich Hoffmann
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The octane enhancer methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) can be produced very efficiently from methanol and isobutene in a reactive distillation column where the heterogeneous catalyst also acts as distillation packing. Some mathematical models have been published for the simulation of such a process but they focus on the physical transport processes between the vapour and liquid phases. However, the aim of this paper is to analyze the importance of the internal and external multicomponent mass and heat transfer phenomena on the catalyst under boiling conditions. Therefore, experiments were carried out in a reactive distillation column at different compositions of feed, column pressures and reflux ratios using a Raschig ring shaped acidic ion exchange resin as the catalyst. The temperature and composition of the liquid phase entering and leaving the catalytic column section were measured. These data were used to evaluate the effectiveness factor of the catalyst with a rigorous macrokinetic model. It is shown that the effectiveness factor varies significantly along the column length. Under certain operating conditions, decomposition of MTBE can occur accompanied by boiling processes inside the catalyst macropores.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
The aldol condensation of acetone to diacetone alcohol (DAA) has been accomplished with catalytic distillation (CD). A steady-state, rate-based model for the reaction zone of the CD column is developed and fitted to the experimental data which were presented in Part I of this paper. This model is un
The gas phase MTBE synthesis reaction was studied on a number of zeolite catalysts, in order to obtain a better understanding of the impact of acidity on zeolite activity for MTBE formation away from thermodynamic equilibrium limitations. The catalysts investigated included a series of dealuminated