Kinetic study of oxychlorination of ethylene on copper chloride and cerium oxide catalysts

Abstract

Estudio cinético dela reacción de oxicloración del etileno para dar lugar a 1.2 dicloroetano o cloruro de vinilo en función de si se usa cloruro de cobre u óxido de cerio respectivamente como catalizadores.Dichloroethane and vinyl chloride are two very useful components in the industry. Those components are used such as solvents or precursors in the case of dichloroethane, and as monomers to produce polymers, in the case of vinyl chloride, PVC. PVC is a useful polymer, used in almost all the applications developed from the human being, such as construction, medicine, feed industry, etc. Several works have been made to produce these compounds. In these works, several catalyst have been tried, such as gold and copper in the case of Juszczyk et al.1 to produce vinyl chloride via dehydrochlorination of dichloroethane, obtaining a vinyl chloride selectivity between 60 and 85 % in case of copper and showing a more propensity to form ethene in case of gold. Other authors, such as Magistro et al.2 developed a method to produce vinyl chloride directly from ethylene using as catalyst iron oxide. In this work, the main objective is to obtain the differences between both catalysts and try to develop a reliable model and compare the main reaction products in the oxychlorination of ethylene using two different catalystus. CuCl2/γ-Al2O3, catalyst which main reaction product is dichloroethane, CuCl2/CeO2, catalyst which main reaction product was ethyl chloride and cerium oxide, catalyst that according to the results of Scharfe et al.3 vinyl chloride is the main reaction product. In the case of cupper chloride, conversions between 5-19 % were achieved with a selectivity of dichloroethane around 90 % and no vinyl chloride was observed. A side product observed during these reactions was ethyl chloride. In the case of cerium oxide, vinyl chloride and 1,2 dichloroethane were the main products obtained, alongside with ethyl chloride and carbon dioxide.