Effect of temperature on catalyst effectiveness factor in styrene monomer production

Styrene is a main feed of many polymer industries, and the main process to produce this material is catalytic dehydrogenation of ethyl-benzene. Beside many reactionparameters which effect on yield of this reaction, one of the main parameter is effectiveness factor of catalyst. Though thisparameter is affected by physical properties of the catalyst, itcan be affected by other reaction’s parameter such as pressure and temperature. Due to increase in diffusion coefficient theeffect of temperature is more considerable. So if we could optimize this parameter under a specific condition forreaction, we can increase the styrene production rate. In this study we tried to investigate the role of temperature on catalyst effectiveness factor, and obtain the optimumconditions to increase yield of reaction and decrease the production costs. For this purpose, the effect of pore sizedistribution of catalyst pallet on the effectiveness factor of catalyst was investigated under the three different temperature (600, 625 and 650°C). From data analysis it seems that in addition of average pore size distribution of catalyst, temperature has a considerable effect on catalyst activity and rate of dehydrogenation reaction of ethyl-benzene to styrene.