Alcohol continued industrial applications

Since the mid-fifties sulfonated resins based on styrene/divinylbenzene copolymers, initially developed as ion exchangers mainly for water treatment, nave also been used as strongly acidic solid catalysts. Witn few exceptions, industrial application in continuous processes is limited to the manufacture of bulk chemicals, sucn as Disphenol A, (meth)acrylates, metnyl ethers of branched olefins (MTBE, TAME) and secondary alcohols (IPA, SBA). 

Esters of methacrylic acid are obtained directly from acetone cyanohydrin by reaction of the latter with concentrated sulfuric acid to give methacrylamide sulfate, followed by reaction with an alcohol. The process is continuous and the methacrylamide sulfate is not isolated. Acetone cyanohydrin is derived from acetone and hydrogen cyanide (Pig. 15-39), Polymerization Procedures. Of particular importmice to the acrylics is the cast or bulk method of polymerization. This method is employed to produce cast polymethyl methacrylate sheets which are widely used in industrial applications. Careful control of polymerization is required to obtain a bubble-free product with good optical clarity. A typical flow sheet for the production of cast eet is shown in fig. lfi-40. Solution, suspension, and particularly emulsion polymerizations are also, widely used with the acrylics. Such polymerization reactions involve relatively conventional batch-type processes. i... 

The system developed by Cultor (Finland) is industrially available and has been operational at industrial scale (1 million hi per year) since 1993. This accelerated maturation system is based on heat treatment of green beer (10 min at 90 °C for complete conversion of a-acetolactate to diacetyl) followed by reduction of diacetyl to acetoin during maturation with a continuous immobilized yeast system operating at a retention time of 2h (Pajunen, 1996). This packed-bed immobilized yeast bioreactor system has found industrial application also in continuous alcohol-free beer production (Mensour et al., 1997). 

Real difficulties remain when attempts are made to predict, to extrapolate, or even to interpolate data for multicomponent mixtures containing hydrocarbons, alcohols, acids, etc. Such systems were affectionately identified as a Krolikowski mess at the conference. Multicomponent mixtures of this kind may include more than one liquid and/or solid phase and with components that commit chemistry as well as physically distribute between the phases are commonly encountered in industrial practice. The goal for the future is to reduce these problems from nightmare to headache proportions in industrial applications, though they may continue to remain an enigma for the theoretician. 

A zeotropic and extractive distillations have been used through the years in the chemical industry to separate mixtures where the relative volatility of the key components is very close, or equal, to unity. Applications from the classical dehydration of alcohol with benzene (1) to more recent ones such as the propylene-propane separation (2) and aromatics recovery from hydrocarbon mixtures with N-methylpyrrolidone (3), indicate a continuous interest through the years in this area. 

As previously pointed out a practical application has been found for isopropyl nitrate. It was originally bebeved 111") that the substance could only be made from iso-propyl iodide and silver nitrate. Direct nitration was found to yield mainly acetone due to the oxidation of the secondary alcoholic group. However a process of continuous nitration of iso-propyl alcohol in the presence of urea has been described by Imperial Chemical Industries patents [36]. isopropyl alcohol and urea were introduced into nitric acid (over 40% HNOj) at its boiling temperature and a current of air stirred and removed unstable products. According to Desscigne (118) the method gave ca. S0% yield. He used nitric acid of over 50% HNO3 at 108-1 lO C. 

Figure 1.1 presents the consumption of the major surfactants in the world market in 1996. Along with soap, linear alkylbenzene sulphonates (LAS) remain the most bulky and cost-effective anionic surfactants. LAS will continue to be the workhorse of the detergents industry on a global basis. However, the LAS share decreases gradually their recess is occupied by alcohol-derived surfactants, first of all alcohol sulphates (AS), alcohol ethoxylates (AE) and alcohol ether sulphates (AES). In West Europe alkylphenol ethoxylates (APE) have been removed over the last two decades from a large number of household applications in view of... 

The alcohol oxidation reactions described herein use inexpensive O2 and NO sources, and there is potential for their use in large-scale industrial processes. Continuous flow methods provide a particularly strategic opportunity for large-scale applications (see Chapter 23). Hermans and coworkers demonstrated a segmented-flow method for their amberlyst-15/NO -catalyzed aerobic oxidation... 

---