Chinese Journal of Chemical Engineering, Vol.17, No.5, 761-766, 2009
Improvement of Isomerization Process of Crude Isoamylene with Tertiary-amyl-alcohol Addition
The present work contributed to a new developed production method for enhancing the quality of isoamylene (IA) by adding a small amount of tertiary amyl alcohol (TAA) to the catalyst of strong acid cation exchange resin. TAA improved the selectivity of 2-methyl-2-butene (2M2B) at a high conversion level for the isomerization of IA. Compared with the other results from the current IA units, the conversion of 2-methyl-1-butene (2M1B), the mass ratio of 2M2B to 2M1B and the selectivity of 2M2B were increased from 0.5474, 7.32 and 0.6864 to 0.72, 12 and 0.95, respectively, while the dimers content in the products decreased from 4.38% to below 1.0%. Optimized conditions for IA isomerization consisted of temperature between 28 and 33 degrees C and system pressure of 0.5 MPa, weight hourly space velocity of 8.0 h(-1) with TAA mass fraction of 0.7%-0.9% in raw material. The results in lab supported bases for the developed process in industrial application which was later proved to be successful. In addition, a possible mechanism of the isomerization process was speculated to propose a key step of water formation in the TAA-added isomerization process and a verified experiment was conducted to support this speculation.