A MEMBRANE REACTOR FOR THE PRODUCTION OF STYRENE FROM ETHYLBENZENE

A rigorous dusty gas model for the catalyst pellet was used in a heterogeneous model of the industrial fixed bed catalytic reactor for the dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene to styrene. The model was used to extract intrinsic kinetics from the industrial reactor data through a simple iteration technique. The model was then used to investigate the advantages of using selective membranes for the removal of the produced hydrogen from the reaction mixture. The removal of the hydrogen enhanced the forward dehydrogenation reaction and hence improved the overall conversion of the ethylbenzene as well as the yield and selectivity of the styrene considerably. The effect of different design and operating parameters were investigated and an estimate of profit gain was determined. In addition to the intrinsic kinetic data of the industrial catalyst, different intrinsic kinetics parameters obtained by using in-house prepared catalysts in a laboratory reactor were used in the simulation of the reactor with permeable membranes; and their effect on the performance of the reactor was studied. The quantitative predictions obtained using such a rigorous heterogeneous model for the reactor should be reasonably reliable, however they still need to be checked experimentally.