Development of a Model for the Synthesis of Unsaturated Polyester by Reactive Distillation

Traditionally polyester production is done in a batch reactor equipped with a separation column for batch distillation. A promising alternative for the intensification of this process is reactive distillation. In this paper, a reactive distillation model is developed for the synthesis of an unsaturated polyester process. The simulation results are compared with the industrial batch reactor output data of the product. It is found that the model predicts the polymer attribute, isomerisation and saturation composition of the polymer in the range of industrial unsaturated polyester production. Industrial unsaturated polyester production time is around 12 hours. However, the simulation study shows that the total production time of unsaturated polyester in a continuous reactive distillation system is between 1.5 hours to 2 hours for the same product quality as during batch production. The equilibrium conversion is also raised by 7% compared to the conventional process. The model demonstrated that reactive distillation has the potential to intensify the process by factor of 6 to 8 in comparison to the batch reactor.