Thermal runaway and shortstopping of esterification in batch stirred reactors

This research deals with the thermal runaway and shortstopping of esterification process in batch stirred reactors. A series of experiments were carried out with RC1e, and an autocatalytic kinetic model of esterification process was established. The divergence criterion (DIV) which describes the trace of Jacobian matrix of temperature and reactant conversion was used to identify the thermal runaway boundary of esterification. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was employed to illustrate the temperature distribution inside the reactor. The cooling temperature and agitation speed significantly affect the esterification runaway. CFD simulation of shortstopping runaway in esterification process with cooling diluent injection was established to study the effect of addition location and quantity of the cold diluent on shortstopping performance.