April 17, 2019-Clariant, a focused and innovative specialty chemical company, recently announced that its new, high-yield OxyMax® PA 690 catalyst has been successfully started at the Petrowidada plant in the Gracie region of East Java, Indonesia. After the o-xylene load was as high as 100 grams / standard cubic meter (g / Nm3) during the industry standard start-up time, the output of the Petrowidada plant increased significantly in the first nine months. And these extremely beneficial results benefit from the unique design and materials used in the new catalyst.
OxyMax PA 690 is a ring catalyst that is produced using Clariant's proprietary fluidized bed coating technology. This process coats catalytically active titanium dioxide and vanadium pentoxide materials and special accelerators in a thin shell on the surface of a ceramic ring. This porous thin shell solves the difficult problem of mass and heat transfer during the selective oxidation reaction from o-xylene to phthalic anhydride (PA). As a result, it reduces excessive oxidation and minimizes unwanted by-products such as carbon oxides and maleic anhydride. Combined with improved catalyst composition and optimized mass transfer characteristics, the shell design can achieve excellent selectivity, and the PA yield at the reactor outlet is as high as 116%-this performance is unique in all previous catalysts.
Thanks to the unique ingredients and formulations developed for many years of research and development projects, the new OxyMax PA600 series catalysts have obtained two patent families. This innovative PA catalyst is an innovation made by Dr. Gerhard Mestl, head of Clariant's oxidation catalyst research and development team, and his team on research and development of instrument technology. In 2017, Dr. Mestl was awarded the Applied Catalysis Award by the European Federation of Catalytic Societies (EFCATS) in recognition of his pioneering contribution in the field of applied selective oxidation.
In addition to enhancing product selectivity and increasing the production of high-quality PA, OxyMax PA 600 series catalysts are extremely flexible and can be customized based on the manufacturer's specific operations and raw materials. This catalyst uses a proprietary bed design in the tubular reactor. This bed system ensures the formation of earlier, more stable hot spots, thereby extending the life of the catalyst. In addition, Clariant provides customers with professional support in catalyst loading and startup, and provides performance optimization services throughout the catalyst's life cycle.
Petrowidada is one of the largest phthalic anhydride producers in Southeast Asia and the only producer in Indonesia. Since 2007, the company's world-class plant in East Java, Indonesia has been successfully using Clariant's o-xylene high-load PA catalyst. After using OxyMax PA 690 in this plant, its total output yield increased by 1%, the quality of PA produced was excellent, and the impurity content at the reactor outlet was also low. Considering that the plant's annual production capacity of phthalic anhydride is as high as 70,000 metric tons, the excellent production efficiency improvement brought by the new catalysts has benefited manufacturers.
Petrowidada Plant Director JakaLelana expressed satisfaction with the new catalyst. "Given the scale of our phthalic anhydride business, efficiency has become a key factor in our continued success. Therefore, we particularly look at the performance of re-catalysts and believe that it can help us develop New growth path. "
Stefan Heuser, senior vice president and general manager of Clariant's Catalysts business unit, added: "For more than a decade, we have successfully provided support for Petrowidada. It is this close partnership that has made us profound I realized the customer's needs and the challenges they faced, and finally achieved a breakthrough product like OxyMax PA 690 catalyst in the field of catalyst development. "