Steady State Simulation of Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor (CSTR) System Using Aspen Plus

Abstract

This project work reports steady state simulation results of a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) system using Aspen-plus simulation. The reaction, investigated in this work was production of ethyl benzene using ethylene and benzene as the reactants. Ethyl benzene, being one of the important raw materials in production of several industrially important chemicals, is often produced alongside with diethyl benzene as an undesired side product. In our simulation, this particular aspect has been examined to maximize the conversion of ethyl benzene from its reactants. Here, we have studied the effect of feed flow rate on steady state behaviour of CSTR and also obtained the optimum feed flow rate in order to maximize the conversion and yield with special consideration of consecutive reactions where one product was desired and another one was undesired. Since the effect of reactor temperature was always going to be crucial in this exothermic reaction mechanism, optimum values were evaluated. The optimum reactor volume was also found out from the simulation results. The optimum temperature was predicted to be 430 K and the optimum reactor volume was found to be 100 m3. The optimum feed flow rates were 0.4 kmol/sec w.r.t benzene and 0.2 kmol/sec w.r.t ethylene. The maximum yield of ethyl benzene was predicted to be 49.75% w.r.t benzene and 99.9% w.r.t ethylene