Project phenol hydrogenation

Estimate the fixed capital cost, the working capital, the cash cost of production, and total cost of production for a new 400,000 metric ton per year (400 kMTA) adipic acid plant located in Northeast Asia. The prices of adipic acid, phenol, hydrogen, and nitric acid have been forecasted for Northeast Asia as 1400/MT, 1000/MT, 1100/MT, and 380/MT, respectively. Assume a 15% cost of capital and a 10-year project life. 

Figure 2 Example of planar projection of one of the configurations of an ortho-para PF dimmer on the surface of a schematic cellulose crystallite showing a phenolic dimmer (a dihydroxy diphenyl methane) conformation of minimal energy and main dimer-cellulose hydrogen bonding. (From Ref. 8.)... 

Since sucrose might seem to be an ideal monomer in polymerization reactions, a very large variety of reactions of this type have been investigated in Sugar Research Foundation supported projects. In the 1940 s, ethylene oxide was combined with sucrose, but the products obtained did not lend themselves directly to commercial development. The first intensive efforts to produce polymers occurred concurrently with the sugar ester detergent activities in the 1950 s. These efforts included studies of the polymerization of sucrose with urea, vinyl acetate,phenol and formaldehyde, ammonia cuid hydrogen, melamine and formaldehyde and meuiy other variations. 

Fig. 7.26 Selected static properties of phenol-(NH3)3. (a) The potential energy surfaces for the nine low-lying excited states, one-dimenional projection in OH distance with the other degrees of freedom frozen at the ground state geometry shown in panel (b). The height of the potential barrier of the lowest excited state is about 0.0029 hartree (0.8 eV). (c) and (f) the bond order of OH and NH. (d) and (g) the Mulliken charge for the site of PhO, the transferring proton site (trH), the total ammonia cluster (AMC), and ammonia molecule AMI that is hydrogen-bonded to phenol, (e) and (h) unpaired electron population at the same sites as in panel (d) and (g). Panels (c), (d), and (e) are for the first excited state, while (f), (g), and (h) exhibit for the second excited state. (Reprinted with permission from K. Nagashima et al., J. Phys. Chem. A 116, 11167 (2012)).

A promising alternative to nitrous oxide is provided by hydrogen peroxide and, in 1997, a project was started by Polimeri Europa to check if TS-1 might be a suitable catalyst for the oxidation of benzene to phenol. 

---