Thermal Modeling of industrial PVC reactor

This paper develops a heat transfer model to simulate the dynamic behavior of industrial PVC batch suspension polymerization reactor. The model, which is based on energy and mass balances, estimates variation of immeasurable parameters like reaction rate and conversion by calculating the jacket cooling water temperature and reactor wall temperature. The comparison is made with the kinetic model and it shows that reaction rate based on heat balance model is very noisy. So we can offer heat balance model for estimation of conversion, however kinetic model can predict a reliable on-line reaction rate. Also we investigated the effect of reaction mixture temperature on results. Results show that model is not sensitive to mixture temperature.

Keywords:

PVC , Reactor modeling , Suspension polymerization , Reaction rate , Thermal modeling