The Improvement And Simulation Of Reactor For Methanol Synthesis

Methanol as an important chemical raw material can be mainly used to produce formaldehyde, and also can be used to produce aminomethane, chlorinated methans, methyl acrylate, methyl methacrylate, dimethyl terephthalate and so on as a methylating agent. It is also the raw material to produce acetate acid, anhydride acetic acid, methyl formate, methyl-carbonate etc. by carbonylation. Besides as an alternative fuel in the future, the requirement of methanol will be very great.Qi Lu Petrifaction Company can produce methanol 100,000 tons annual with the Lurgi shell and tube reactor, with middle-pressure steam as the by-product. But the amount of catalyst designed was not adequate, and the catalyst was easily poisoned. In this paper, basing on the actual production data, we simulated the whole process applying the Aspen Plus software. And we added an adiabatic section to the reactor in which way we can also get higher per pass conversion.