Pavel Ditl

The goal of this paper is to explain the chemical engineering backgrounds for operations participating on catalyst production in the automotive industry. It is shown that chemical engineering knowledge can help to a better understanding and optimisation of the production process. Besides the contribution mentioned above this paper brings the description of the up to date and interesting technology developed and patented by the worldwide leader in the chemical engineering - BASF. The car catalyst production process consists of two steps. Firstly, the coating slurry is produced and secondly, it is applied to the substrate. This paper focuses on the slurry production especially with regard to its dispersion, mixing, particle size reduction, and the influence of parameters affecting this process

Stirred tanks for dispersion, the pre-dispersion of two immiscible liquids or particulate solidliquid suspension are extensively used in the chemical, food, pharmaceutical and metallurgical industries, for purposes such as suspension/emulsion polymerisation, heterogeneous/phase-transfer catalytic chemical reactions, paint production and hydrometallurgical solvent extraction. The aim of this paper is to propose the simple dispersion model enabling the prediction of particle size changes over time and taking into account the type of breakup mechanisms, the non-homogeneity of local turbulent energy dissipation rate in an agitated vessel and the effect of the number of times the liquid passes through the impeller and the impeller zone. The model was successfully tested on data published by Ditl et al. (1981).

In this contribution, it is explained in the detail how useful Microsoft EXCEL could be for thesimulation of process lines. The report contains a manual flowsheet as well as a tutorial case and the results of its application for Nitric acid production can be gained.