Reaction Kinetics for the Synthesis of Diphenyl Carbonate from Dimethyl Carbonate

PC (polycarbonate) is one of the widely used engineering plastics. Polycarbonate (PC) is traditionally produced by the reaction of phosgene and bisphenol-A. This phosgene process has the disadvantage as the high toxicity and corrosiveness of phosgene. The main point of focus to overcome the disadvantage of phosgene based process has been a route through dimethyl carbonate (DMC) to diphenyl carbonate (DPC). In this paper, for the DPC synthesis reaction using PBO as a catalyst, the effect of reaction temperature, reactant ratio, catalyst concentration on the reaction yield was investigated. A kinetic model for the DPC synthesis reaction was proposed and kinetic parameters for the proposed model was determined from batch reactor experiments. The predicted results by the proposed model were in good agreement with the experimental results.