Reactor intensification on glycerol-to-acrylic acid conversion: a modelling study†

This work presents a numerical analysis for glycerol dehydration & acrolein oxidation to produce acrylic acid and determine the optimal process conditions combining computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with response surface methodology (RSM) techniques. For glycerol dehydration, optimum conditions are found at 623 K, 5731.6 h⁻¹ GHSV, and a glycerol mass fraction of 0.32, resulting in a glycerol conversion of 94.2% and an acrolein selectivity of 79.6%. Further, the simulations with optimized conditions for two proposed configurations have insignificant glycerol conversion and acrolein selectivity suggesting that alternative reactor configurations have limited improvement. In the case of the acrolein selective oxidation process, an optimum temperature of 583.5 K, a GHSV of 1600 h⁻¹, and an oxygen-to-acrolein molar ratio of 5.73 result in an acrylic acid yield and a selectivity of 80.9% and 87.5%, respectively. In the case of a membrane reactor with distributed oxygen feeding, the acrylic acid yield reached 85.9% and it exhibits a remarkable selectivity of 97.1%.