CFD and reaction aspects for the soybean oil epoxidation in a millireactor

Abstract

The epoxidation of soybean oil is a relevant reaction to produce epoxidized soybean oil (ESO), a plasticizer component for polyvinyl chloride (PVC). The reaction is industrially conducted in fed-batch reactors, mainly due to safety reasons associated with the high exothermicity of the epoxidation reaction, highlighting the attention to the heat transfer effects. Usually, a biphasic system is applied to produce ESO, in which the mass transfer effects also require care. Micro- and millireactors are reaction devices with reduced dimensions expected to intensify the mass and heat transfer effects. The present article analyzed simulated scenarios to conduct the proposed reaction system in a millireactor. The analyses involved: (1) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) of a simplified system containing water and soybean oil, in which the droplet generation was studied; (2) the reaction system performance, in terms of the temperature profile and the iodine and oxirane indexes that characterize the oil. The iodine and oxirane indexes achieved were 9.16 g I2/100 g and 6.62 %, respectively, for 7200 s of mean residence time, jointly with a mild overshoot in temperature.