(492e) Key Technologies to Produce Bio-Ethylene and Vam

Bio-manufacture is expected as a solution to deal with challenges decreasing of petroleum resources and increasing environmental protection. A packaged industrial technology to produce bio-Ethylene and Vinyl Acetate Monomer (VAM) from bio-ethanol has been developed by Tianjin University. A 100,000 MTA VAM plant was built using this technology in 2012, which is the first VAM industrial plant in China.  

This process comprises of sections of dehydration of bio-ethanol to produce bio-ethylene and acetoxylation of bio-ethylene to produce VAM. In this advanced process, a series of innovations have been made including a high efficiency process with adiabatic bed reactor was invented for ethanol dehydration to ethylene; the deactivation mechanism of the catalyst by CO was established via the DFT calculations, based on which a low energy consuming process for VAM production with high CO tolerance was developed; a dedicated database for VAM production was  set up based on the combination of quantum mechanics and GEMC method; the Mechanical Vapour Recompressor (MVR) technology was adopted to recover the low-rank reaction heat in the start-up period; a high efficiency VAM reactor was designed via the investigation of hydrodynamics properties of both single-phase and multiphase flow with the assistance of computational fluid dynamics.