Method of Removing water from Products of Dehydration Reaction of 3-hydroxypropioic acid in Acrylic acid Process

Abstract The present predominant resource of acrylic acid is formed partial oxidation of propene, produced as a by-product from industrial production of ethylene and gasoline. This process depends on the processing of petrochemicals as raw material, resulting in resource depletions and many environmental problems. Therefore, biomass technology has been introduced to reduce the disadvantages of existing conventional process. The proposed process is composed of a bio-fermentation reactor, a catalytic dehydration reactor, a quencher, and an acrylic acid purification unit. Among them, it focuses on the quencher process. Recently, most of the research is currently focused on microorganisms in fermentation reaction and developing catalysts in dehydration reaction. However, this technology also remains a problem that a large quantity of water is required in the bio-fermentation and dehydration reactors. In this paper, we focus on the after the dehydration of 3-hydroxypropionic acid to produce acrylic acid about the method of efficient removal of water. To solve this problem, we introduced a quencher using solvent to remove water and improve the efficiency of the process. It is essential to remove water in order to obtain high purity of the acrylic acid. We designed the process using Aspen Plus v8.8 simulator. Approximately 76.0 wt% of water, 22.6 wt% of acrylic acid, 1.4wt% 3-hydroxypropionic acid were fed to quencher. The results from the simulation show that 64.2 wt% of water was removed and 47.5 wt% of total flow was saved. The elimination of water reduces the overall flow rate, resulting in reduced equipment size of the process. Therefore, we expect that the use of this method will reduce the capital cost and operating cost of the acrylic acid purification process.