Comparison Study of Model Based Industrial Low-Density Polyethylene Production in Tubular Reactor

Abstract

The challenges of Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE) industry kept growing, and manufacturers have to come out with solutions to debottleneck the reactor output while abiding to the stringent product specification. One of the way to cope with this is through computational modelling. In the present study, the process behaviour approximation of LDPE production in tubular reactor (TR) was represented by computational model. Three models were compared and critically discussed in this paper. Plots of reactor temperature along the axial length of TR for all the models were shown and significant variations were observed between each model. The results depict that higher rate constant for propagation give higher temperature profile, and different rate constant for initiator decomposition produce dissimilar rate of polymerisation. In the later section, a comparison study of varying the amount of initiator at reactor inlet versus adding extra injector to a LDPE tubular reactor (LDPE-TR) was conducted and the results were showed in the form of temperature and monomer conversion profile.