Dehydration kinetics for coal‐based isobutanol on γ‐Al₂O₃

Abstract

Isobutanol dehydration using γ‐Al2O3 catalysts to produce isobutene was carried out by a fixed bed reactor at 0.1 MPa. The effects of temperature, weight hourly space velocity, and particle size of catalyst on the conversion of isobutanol and selectivity of isobutene were investigated to find the optimum reaction conditions and get the kinetics information. The experimental results indicated that higher temperature could improve the conversion of isobutanol while a peak of selectivity of isobutene can be monitored with the temperature increasing. Meanwhile, increasing the flow rate leads to a decrease in the conversion of isobutanol, but showed little effect on selectivity of isobutene. The intrinsic kinetics model of isobutanol dehydration over γ‐Al2O3 was developed according to the experimental results. The adsorption of isobutanol was considered as a rate‐determining step from the analysis results of reaction mechanism, and kinetics parameters were obtained by Levenberg‐Marquardt algorithm. The calculated results agreed well with the experimental data.

Catalytic Approaches to Monomers for Polymers Based on Renewables

“…Isobutylene ( A3 ) is also accessible by dehydration of isobutanol, obtained via fermentation, with acid catalysts − (Scheme ). Bio-based A3 is industrially produced by Global Bioenergies (fermentation from sugars), Butamax (Joint Venture of BP and DuPont), and Gevo (both from isobutanol) .…”