|  | Revolutionary Technology for Aromatics Alkylation
This new liquid-phase alkylation technology employs a zeolite catalyst to produce very high yields of high purity cumene at low equipment and operating costs.
The culmination of a decade of catalyst development effort at ExxonMobil, combined with Badger's extensive experience in designing ethylbenzene units, this highly cost-effective process can be tailored to your needs.
- Potential Cost Advantage
- Simple Fixed Bed Processing
- Process Features
Potential Cost Advantage
Process design capitalizes on the catalyst's exceptionally high selectivity to reduce your capital and operating costs. Key is the catalyst's ability to alkylate benzene with propylene and minimize unwanted propylene oligomerization reactions. Major advantages include:
- Very high propylene utilization
- Low capital cost
- Very high cumene yield and purity
- Low utility consumption
Simple Fixed Bed Processing
The reaction section employs both alkylation and transalkylation to achieve high overall yield. Fresh and recycle benzene is combined with propylene and fed to an alkylation reactor where cumene is formed at mild temperatures and pressures along with some by-product polyisopropyl-benzenes (PIPB).
Very low aromatics recycle reduces benzene recovery requirements. The size of the cumene column is minimized by the very low levels of butylbenzene and other undesirable by-products which must be separated from the crude cumene. The bottoms stream from the cumene column is further fractionated in a small PIPB column. PIBPs are re-cycled with benzene to the reactor section to be transalkylated back to cumene in high per pass yield, also at mild conditions.
Process Features
Proprietary zeolite catalyst system is highly stable and regenerable. Its use eliminates environmental problems associated with handling mineral acids, and allows low cost all-carbon steel construction.
Fixed bed reactors operate at near isothermal conditions. Excellent temperature control reduces by-products and is accomplished without complex reactor internals.
Flexible process can utilize a wide range of feeds, from dilute refinery grade propane/propylene streams to higher purity chemical grade propylene streams.
Low fractionation requirements reduce utility consumption, opening the way to revamp existing plants. For solid phosphoric acid (SPA) revamps, capacity increases of 50% and more may be achieved without additional fractionation investment.
Excellent cumene purity of 99.97% can be achieved with yields approaching theoretical. Major contaminants are significantly reduced: n-propylbenzene to as low as 100 ppm and butylbenzenes as low as 20 ppm.
Bromine Index, a measure of propylene oligomers, is typically 5, eliminating the need for clay treating.
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