BIOETHYLENE IS A PROMISING SOURCE OF ENERGY AND RAW MATERIALS FOR CHEMICAL INDUSTRY

Abstract

The modern development of energy, chemical technology and other industrial production sectors is largely focused on processes using renewable raw materials. In the structure of non-traditional energy sources the lion’s share belongs to biomass. The paper provides an prospects assessment for using the available, predominantly solid Ukrainian bioresources, total available amount of which as wood, grain straw and other domestic and industrial organic waste is more than 120 million tons per year, to meet state’s needs both for lubricant and fuel materials and raw materials for chemical industry. A following sequence of transformations for this problem solution were investigated: cellulose of the original raw biomaterial — glucose — bioethanol — ethylene. The option of increasing the effectiveness of the latter stage was considered of obtaining bioethane from bioethanol due to the use of the latest catalysts. The results both physical and computational study of bioethanol dehydration process are given, that allowed to reveal the peculiarities of process kinetics when proposed catalyst using. It is shown that, in addition to reducing energy consumption, the catalyst provides 91 % selectivity for ethylene at ~95 % of the biomethanol conversion rate. The initial data for the design of highly efficient catalytic processes and reactors for the dehydration of bioethanol to ethylene were obtained. Bibl. 20, Fig. 2, Tab. 3.