MODELING AND SIMULATION OF POLYPROPYLENE PRODUCTION USING ASPEN AND OPTIMIZATION

Abstract

With the increasing demand of polymer products, there are abundant opportunities for upstream petrochemical industries to enhance their present capacity and deliver optimum quality products to the downstream industries to make the whole system efficient and profitable. Currently the market in India, predicted to have a huge demand-supply gap of Polypropylene of around 1795 KTA for 2015 on the basis of 2009, with CAGR of 13% (2005-06 to 2011-12). This large gap must be filled by adopting a sustainable way of optimization for the existing and new plants to meet the goals of high efficiency and profitability with minimum energy usage and waste generation. With the advent of computers and simulating software like AS1EN PLUS® it is possible to design and optimize a particular process. Proper design can significantly reduce production cost as well as provide make the process safe and reduce environmental hazards. The materials, unit operations and processes involved are identified and steady state simulation is done. Each unit is taken into consideration and some variables are optimized to give better yield and energy efficiency. The model considers the important issues of physical property and thermodynamic model selections, polymer properties, and catalyst characterization, in addition to the traditional Ziegler-Natta polymerization kinetics. This Model development involves basic chemical engineering principles and improved sollware tools, Polymers Plus and Aspen Plus. We consider a Ziegler-Natia catalyst with multiple catalyst sites. This steady state simulation of Polypropylene is based on the Physical property data and design of real life plants. The results obtained from simulation are matching with the industry for which the process is modeled with the same operating parameters and physical property data