Model Development and Validation of Ethyl tert-Butyl Ether Production Reactors Using Industrial Plant Data

This work considers the development and validation of a first-principles dynamic model for the production of ethyl tert-butyl ether (ETBE) in the presence of the coproducts diisobutene (DIB) and tert-butyl alcohol (TBA). Desulfonation is assumed to be the main deactivation mechanism of the catalyst used, an acidic ion exchange resin. Operational data from an industrial ETBE production plant, taken over the period of 1 year, were used to estimate. both the deactivation and DIB kinetic constant parameters. A data reconciliation strategy was employed to convert the raw data into a consistent data set, representing the most likely process operation data The parameters estimated were incorporated in a set of detailed mass and energy balances, together with additional kinetic and physical information from the literature, to originate a distributed parameter model capable of accurately describing the operation of two industrial reactors used for the production of ETBE. Model development and validation were performed in gPROMS Modelbuilder with the necessary physical properties calculated by Aspen Plus, through the CAPE-OPEN standard. The desulfonation decay order obtained was close to second order kinetics, previously proposed by other authors. The activation energy estimated for the desulfonation process was also comparable with past reported values, while the value of the pre-exponential factor for the desulfonation was slightly lower. Different temperature ranges and particle sizes are attributed as possible causes for the differences observed.