Vinyl acetate monomer plant

Figure 5.6 The vinyl acetate monomer plant (Luyben and Tyreus 1998). The reactor-separator process core is highlighted.

Luyben, W., Tyreus, B., An industrial design/control study for vinyl acetate monomer plant, Comput. Chem. Eng., 22, 867, 1998... 

The industrial process for the vapor-phase manufacture of vinyl acetate monomer is quite common (Daniels, 1989) and utilizes widely available raw materials. Vinyl acetate is used chiefly as a monomer to make polyvinyl acetate and other copolymers. Hoechst-Celanese, Union Carbide, and Quantum Chemical are reported U.S. manufacturers. DuPont also currently operates a vinyl acetate process at its plant in LaPorte, Texas. To protect any proprietary DuPont information, all of the physical property and kinetic data, process flowsheet information, and modeling formulation in the published paper come from sources... 

World production of vinyl acetate monomer was 4 x 10 t in 1999. This represented 84% of the total capacity. In 2002, North American companies produced 1654 X 10 t of vinyl acetate. See Table 5 for producers and their capacities (22). The dominant method of production in North America is by the reaction of ethylene with acetic acid and oxygen in the presence of palladium catalyst. New construction in recent years has been focused in southeast asia, although European and North American producers have expanded their plants. 

Celanese Chemicals (Dallas, TX, USA www.celanese.com) is building a 600 000 tpa acetic acid plant at the Nanjing Chemical Industry Park, adjacent to the BASF/Sinopec petrochemical complex being built. Production is expected by eariy 2006. Acetic acid demand in China is growing by 10%/y, as is demand for its major derivative, vinyl acetate monomer. 

A Vinyl Acetate Monomer (VAM) plant by Hoechst Acetyls Singapore Pte Ltd (HAS), which started up in August 1997. 

Already, the hrst practical application for a gold-palladium catalyst within a major industrial process is well established for the manufacture of vinyl acetate monomer (VAM) [22,23], and a pilot plant has been built for the production of methyl glycolate [24],... 

Many analytical techniques are in use for the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of monomers and oligomers extracted from PA6 (GC, differential refrac-tometry, IR, PC, SEC, HPLC, RPLC, etc.). FTIR has been used for quantitative analysis of caprolactam oligomer content (extract %) in polyamide-6 [113], The method, which involves a 3h extraction in boiling methanol, is suitable for process control and plant environment. Kolnaar [114] has used FTIR characterisation of fractional extracts with pentane, hexane, and heptane of HDPE for blow moulding applications. Vinyl acetate in packaging film has similarly been determined by quantitative FUR. 

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