MODELING OF PHTHALIC ANHYDRIDE PRODUCTION PROCESS IN BOTH FIXED AND FLUIDIZED BEDS REACTORS

The colorless solid, phthalic anhydride is an important industrial chemical, especially for the industrial scale production of plasticizers for plastics manufacturing. One of the most important approaches to obtain this widely used material in the production of dyes is via catalytic oxidation of ortho-xylene. The current study is aiming to simulate the phthalic anhydride production scale process employing computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Two types of reactor are considered: fixed and fluidized beds. Representative equations including kinetics, continuity, mass transfer, energy, momentum and pressure drop are solved simultaneously. Subsequently, the effects of inlet temperature on conversion percentage of phthalic anhydride production process is observed in detail. The ultimate goal of the investigation for the involved reactions which are pyrogenic, is controlling the peak temperature of the reactor. Our investigation shows that conversion percentage of phthalic anhydride in fluidized bed is much higher in compared to fixed bed. Furthermore, the results show that undesirable production conversion of fluidized bed is less proportional to fixed bed production scale.