Reactor Modeling of Gas‐Phase Polymerization of Ethylene

Abstract

A model is developed for evaluating the performance of industrial-scale gas-phase polyethylene production reactors. This model is able to predict the properties of the produced polymer for both linear low-density and high-density polyethylene grades. A pseudo-homogeneous state was assumed in the fluidized bed reactor based on negligible heat and mass transfer resistances between the bubble and emulsion phases. The nonideal flow pattern in the fluidized bed reactor was described by the tanks-in-series model based on the information obtained in the literature. The kinetic model used in this work allows to predict the properties of the produced polymer. The presented model was compared with the actual data in terms of melt index and density and it was shown that there is a good agreement between the actual and calculated properties of the polymer. New correlations were developed to predict the melt index and density of polyethylene based on the operating conditions of the reactor and composition of the reactants in feed.

Kinetic modeling of propylene homopolymerization in a gas-phase fluidized-bed reactor

“…Polypropylene particles are Geldart B, thus, the constants of this type of particles were chosen and shown in Table 3. It is worth noting that the same approach was adopted in similar modeling attempts and shown that this model provides good results [3,4,[23][24][25][26]. Table 4 Operating conditions and physical parameters considered in this work for modeling fluidized-bed polypropylene reactors.…”

Two-phase modeling of a gas phase polyethylene fluidized bed reactor

“…They employed a tanks-in-series model to represent the ethylene polymerization reactor. Kiashemshaki et al (2004) adopted the model of Alizadeh et al (2004) and provided correlations for estimating the properties of the polymer product, such as melt index and density, from the operating conditions of the reactor.…”

Dynamic process modeling and hybrid intelligent control of ethylene copolymerization in gas phase catalytic fluidized bed reactors

“…A lot of research has been done on either mathematical modeling [21][22][23] or computer fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling [24][25][26][27] of this system. For testing the control structures, our newly modified dynamic model for ethylene copolymerization 20 is adopted.…”