6.

CONCLUSION
As a conclusion, the main objective of this project is to introduce a process in producing

of acetonitrile. SOHIO process was chosen as the process to manufacture acetonitrile because it
was based on propylene as the starting material which is the most cost-effective process. The raw
material used for this process are propylene, ammonia and air used in excess with the ratio are 1:
1.2:9.5. Ammoxidation of propylene takes place in air at 2 bar pressure and 623 K. By using
catalyst that is oxidized bismuth molybdenum, the reaction takes place with conversion 0.69 in
76s and a volume of 2.1372 m3 is obtained
In the SOHIO process, propylene, ammonia and oxygen are reacted to form acrylonitrile
and the major by-products that is acetonitrile. The main distributors of acetonitrile in the world
are INEOS, Purification Technologies Inc, BioSolve BV, Carlo Erba Reagents and PetrolChem
Trading Ltd. Malaysian should take initiative to start producing its own acetonitrile since that it
is one of the high demand product nowadays. The unique chemical properties of acetonitrile
itself make it a multipurpose solvent such as polarity, low boiling point, low acidity and low UV
cut off.
The Plug Flow Reactor (PFR) is selected as preferred reactor because it is more suitable
compared to the other reactors. This is based on the graph plotted since a larger volume will be
obtained if we use Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor (CSTR) or Fluidized-Bed Reactor (FBR). A
smaller volume means that the size of the reactor required for the production of acetonitrile is
much smaller. Besides that, higher conversion per volume will be obtained if we use PFR. PFR
is also more suitable for a large scale production. Since the high temperature of PFR is more
suitable compared to CSTR. Finally, it has a lower operating cost and a very good heat transfer
rate.

Besides that, in distillation columns part, Mc-cabe Thiele method are used to estimate the
number of stages used in distillation columns. By using this method, efficiency of distillation
column in production of acetonitrile have been obtained at 88.33% efficiency. At reflux ratio of
1.2 the theoretical stages determine to be 26.5 stages which is according to theory, the lesser
value of reflux ratio, the higher and the theoretical stages thus, the efficiency of distillation
column is at maximum value. As mention earlier in introduction part, acetonitrile is a byproduct
of acrylonitrile production that have a very small value of composition, due to that it is difficult
to calculate the theoretical stages in distillation column. Therefore, some values has been
assumed in this calculation in order to get the number of stages for this process.
To obtain a perfect design for production of acetonitrile, combination of three aspects
which are chemical reaction engineering, numerical and separation are used. From the CRE we
were able to find the suitable reactor to be used , from numerical we were able to calculate the
volume of the reactor and finally we were able to get the number of stages from the separation
processes.