Author(s)

Zhenya Duan¹, Shaopu Li¹, Lei Wang¹, Yuan Cheng², Jingtao Wang³, Junmei Zhang^2*

¹College of Electromechanical Engineering, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China.
²College of Chemical Engineering, Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, China.
³School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China.

Producing tert-butyl alcohol (TBA) by slurry catalytic distillation is a green new technology. In order to provide reference data for this production process, this paper applied advanced simulation software Aspen to simulate and optimize the slurry catalytic distillation process of producing TBA. And the kinetics equation of isobutylene hydration which is catalyzed by cation exchange resin in continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) is used to display the reaction process. Appropriate theoretical plate number of rectifying section, reaction section and stripping section, reflux ratio and liquid hold-up are obtained by the analog computation. Under this process condition, the conversion rate of isobutylene is 82.53%; the mole fraction of TBA in the bottom discharging is 82.5%.

Slurry, Catalytic Distillation, Hydration of Isobutylene, Analog Computation

Duan, Z. , Li, S. , Wang, L. , Cheng, Y. , Wang, J. and Zhang, J. (2016) Simulation of Tert-Butyl Alcohol Forming Process by Slurry Catalytic Distillation with Custom Kinetic Program. Advances in Chemical Engineering and Science, 6, 140-148. doi: 10.4236/aces.2016.62016.