Effect of cooling rate on improving the performance of the catalytic PVC reactor in Egyptian petrochemical company

Abstract

Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.This work investigates the possibility of improving the performance of poly vinyl chloride (PVC) reactor in Egyptian Petrochemical Company (EPC) by enhancing the rate of heat transfer via increasing the cooling rate of the reactant. Two booster pumps have been installed for the four reactors to increase the flow rate of the cooling water in the reactor jacket by a factor of 1.25. Different cooling rates were investigated under different batches of the process. In addition a comparison between theoretical and actual results obtained was carried out. It was found that increasing the cooling rate has increased the PVC productivity of each batch to 23.3 ton/batch by a percentage of 115% of the design capacity; Decreasing the time of the reaction from 6 hr to 4.5 hr. The overall capacity of PVC plant increased by 25% more than the design capacity. In addition a reduction in the operation hours of the agitators i.e saving in energy consumption; Finally increasing the lifetime of the reactor by reducing the frequency of the process of chemical cleaning that has side effect on the reactor life time.