Ethylbenzene dehydrogenation: Reactor modeling and simulation

Abstract

Nowadays, Styrene is a product that takes part in the great majority of industrial processes to produce objects that we use in the daily life. Because it is a very affordable component, with which you can generate all kinds of polymers with very useful and manageable physical and chemical properties, its importance in the industrial world invites us to think if the conditions of the reactors step are the best to carry the ethylbenzene dehydrogenation on properly. The purpose of this work is to generate a code from both theoretical and experimental sources of information, and simulate the ethylbenzene dehydrogenation reaction for the subsequent study of the evolution of the physical properties of the components, the profiles of the variables to be controlled and the kinetic parameters of the most important reactions, in different types of flow models with the aim of determining what is the flow model that gives us results closer to the real ones, and then analyse how the control variables of the process affect to the reactors system and the properties of the components, using the model of flow previously determined as closer to the real one In order to develop the code, the 3 most relevant balances were used, from a mathematical point of view, such as: the mass balance, the energy balance and the motion balance; And from the point of view of the kinetics of the reactions, some expressions that follow the formalism of LHHW have been used to explain the mechanism of catalytic reaction, which considers a physicochemical reaction model divided into seven stages. The results obtained have been dealt with through the Microsoft Excel program for a better understanding of these and subsequently represented, discussed and compared in order to extract a suitable conclusion.