Kinetic and Modeling Study of the Ethylene Oxychlorination to 1,2-Dichloroethane in Fluidized-Bed Reactors

We present the development and the validation of a new kinetic model for the ethylene oxychlorination reaction, relying on 9 chemical reactions to describe the evolution of 12 species (including 6 major byproducts). A set of 28 kinetic runs was performed over a commercial CuCl2/γ-Al2O3 catalyst in a dedicated tubular flow reactor setup operating in a chemical regime. The design of the experiments, covering the effects of temperature, pressure, C2H4 feed molar fraction, and C2H4/HCl and C2H4/O2 feed molar ratios, was planned according to a composite fractional factorial design. Nineteen adaptive rate constants were successfully estimated by multiresponse nonlinear regression of the experimental data. The resulting kinetic model was able to reproduce the experimental 1,2-dichloroethane yields with relative errors below 10% for most of the kinetic runs. We also report the development of two mathematical models of oxychlorination fluidized-bed reactors, namely the simple two-phase (STP) and the axially disper...