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Calcium Stearate as an Acid Scavenger for Synthesizing High Concentrations of Bromobutyl Rubber in a Microreactor System
journal contribution
posted on 2018-03-02, 00:00 authored by Pei Xie, Kai Wang, Guangsheng LuoThe preparation of bromobutyl rubber
(BIIR) faces two challenges,
the high viscosity of the reaction system and the accumulation of
generated HBr during the reaction, which result in lower productivity,
higher energy consumption, and lower selectivity for BIIR-1. In this
work, we developed an efficiently intensified technology using calcium
stearate as the acid scavenger and a microreactor as the reaction
platform. We successfully realized both high productivity and high
selectivity for synthesizing high concentrations of bromobutyl rubber.
The optimized results indicate that using predispersed calcium stearate
in a butyl rubber (IIR) solution (xCa of
about 0.8 wt %) as the acid scavenger could guarantee sufficiently
high selectivity for BIIR-1 (w of almost 95%). A
T-junction microreactor with slitlike microchannels is suitable for
mixing a high-viscosity IIR solution and a Br2 solution.
As the concentration of IIR increases from 10 wt % to 15 wt %, the
conversion of IIR could increase by 13%, and the residence time could
be shortened to less than 1 min. The utility of the reactants and
the reaction efficiency have both been largely improved.