Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Napoleon Ballroom C-D, 3rd fl (Sheraton New Orleans)
The current technologies for the production of organic chemicals, fuels and polymers depend mainly on the use of fossil hydrocarbons. However, the increase in energy demand, the prospect of depletion of natural resources and the growing concerns with environmental issues created the need for developing sustainable alternatives based on renewable raw materials. Currently, Brazil is in a privileged position with respect to the bioethanol production from renewable resource. The optimization of current processes for obtaining bioethanol may lead to cheaper and competitive production processes, thus favoring the production of bioproducts derived from bioethanol. This new perspective has also driven the development of new processes as can be seen with the recent announcements of construction of new plants in Brazil for the production of "green" ethene and propene from bioethanol. Bearing this in mind, this work has as main objective the intensification of "green" propene production process from renewable resources by olefins conversion technology (OCT) considering the Brazilian scenario as a case study. The proposed intensification process consists in replacing the fixed bed catalytic reactors normally used in the metathesis reaction in the conventional OCT process by a reactive distillation column. This intensification process combines in single equipment the reaction and distillation processes, which implies in a better usage of raw materials as well as the reduction of effluents from the process, improving in this way the environmental performance of the proposed settings. The simulation of the integrated "green" propene production was performed with the aid of the commercial simulator ASPEN PLUSTM.