Modeling Ethylene/1-Butene Copolymerizations in Industrial Slurry Reactors

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• 作者：Antô ; nio G. Mattos Neto ; Marcelo F. Freitas ; Má ; rcio Nele ; and Jos&eacute ; Carlos Pinto
• 刊名：Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research
• 出版年：2005
• 出版时间：April 13, 2005
• 年：2005
• 卷：44
• 期：8
• 页码：2697 - 2715
• 全文大小：276K
• 年卷期：v.44,no.8(April 13, 2005)
• ISSN：1520-5045

文摘

In this work, a comprehensive model is developed for the ethylene/1-butene copolymerizationin an industrial slurry polymerization reactor for linear low-density polyethylene synthesis. Themodel is able to describe the dynamic evolution of the molecular weight averages, comonomercontent, particle size averages, melt index, and density of the final polymer resin and extendsmodeling results available in the open literature. A new modeling approach is used to describethe evolution of particle sizes, which is based on the definition of a joint distribution of massand catalyst concentration of solid polymer particles. It is shown that the model successfullydescribes the operation of an industrial slurry polymerization reactor. For this reason, the modelis used to analyze how sensitive the final polymer properties are to variations of the feedconditions and to development of segregated mixing zones inside the reactor vessel. It is shownthat the ethylene feed flow rate is the most influential process variable and that the existenceof very small segregated reactor zones can lead to very serious operation problems, such asparticle agglomeration.