Facile Approach To Design Thermally Safe Operating Conditions for Isoperibolic Homogeneous Semibatch Reactors Involving Exothermic Reactions

Abstract

To prevent thermal runaway incidents in semibatch reactors (SBRs), designing thermally safe operating conditions should be considered first. Regretfully, determination of the reaction kinetics for organic reactions is a time-consuming and money-consuming process, especially in the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Therefore, it is desirable to develop kinetic-parameter-free methods that can design the right operating conditions. Along this line, a new facile approach to design thermally safe operating conditions for isoperibolic homogeneous SBRs has been developed in this article. This approach is developed on the basis of deep insights into the phenomenon that the MTSR vs reaction temperature profiles for isothermal exothermic reactions present an “S” shape. The approach has been experimentally validated using the hydrolysis reaction of acetic anhydride. However, more work should be carried out to extend this method to more complex reaction systems, like consecutive reactions.