Study of an industrial continuous process for catalytic synthesis of glycerol carbonate
Glycerol is a by-product of biofuels obtained by transesterification of triglycerides. With developmentof biofuel, glycerol production is growing. The use of glycerol in cosmetic, pharmaceutical and food industriesis not increasing in the same way, so the surplus should be preferable to market. One way of development isthe synthesis of glycerol carbonate which is an interesting intermediate for fine chemistry. The synthesisused by Novance is carbonylation of glycerol by urea with a batch process. This reaction produces, as wellas glycerol carbonate, a high quantity of gaseous ammonia extracted from reactive mixture in a vacuum. Thescale of this gaseous emission and its irregularity during synthesis show the limits of production using abatch process. The aim of this study is to develop the continuous process of the synthesis to solve thisproblem. To carry out the monitoring of the reaction, at first, analytical methods were used. With suchmethods, knowledge of the batch process was improved in order to determine the best criteria for acontinuous process. A unit of reactive desorption was then elaborated to create a liquid-gas biphasic systemin a counter-flow configuration. A series of preliminary experiments were performed to develop the processwhich was optimised by a Doehlert plan.