Process Design and Control of Industrial Propylene Polymerization

Nowadays, due to the scientific and technological innovation, human life has an important with the development of technology. Among many industries, the petrochemical industry is closed related to people’s daily life. Polyolefin industry plays a key role in the petrochemical industry, including plastic, rubber, and synthetic fiber. Demand of polyolefin products is gradually rising due to the emerging economies appear. According to the analysis of IHS Market in 2016, the annual growth of global polyolefin demand expect to over 4 % in 2020. In 2020-2025, the annual growth is close to 4%, reaching 190 million tons/year and 230 million tons/year, respectively. Many researchers begin to discuss the system of polymerization and operation of reactor. Comparing the polymer system with other systems is more complicated, due to the polydispersity, solubility of the monomer in the polymer and phase equilibrium calculation at high temperature. Above all, thermodynamic properties and phase equilibrium calculation play a key role for this polymerization reaction system. For polymerization of propylene, a lot of researchers development comprehensive models for physical and thermodynamic properties to reach a better simulation accuracy (Khare et al., 2004; Feng et al., 2005) The aim of this work is to design and control of industrial propylene polymerization processes, including the decisions of thermodynamic model, physical properties and reactor conditions. Based on the product specifications, the multi-scale polymerizations from Ziegler-Natta catalyst are used to determine the suitable kinetic parameters. Aspen Plus is then used to complete the flowsheet design for the reactor conditions, dynamic control, and grade-transition. Hope that these simulation results can be utilized to improve the real industrial polypropylene processes.

Project ID:PB10708-1250
External Project ID:MOST107-2221-E182-030