Research Projects

Acetonitrile is an industrially important chemical, which finds its application as solvent and feed stock in various petrochemical, agrochemical, pharmaceutical processes. The global acetonitrile market is growing at a CAGR of 5.3% and it is expected to reach USD 347 million by 2026 (170 kilo metric ton). The proposal aims at developing an efficient and eco-friendly process for acetonitrile production from dilute bioethanol through a continuous vapor phase catalytic ammoxidation. The proposed process is sustainable and economically attractive and as it utilises renewable dilute bioethanol (40-60%) and air as oxidizing agent instead of pure oxygen. The proposed process is attractive as it eliminates the problems of existing acetonitrile production ie., multi-step process routes, hazardous by-products, non-renewable feedstocks, lower conversion, and product yields. Although, a very few studies reported on catalytic ammoxidation of bioethanol to acetonitrile, most of them use pure ethanol for ammoxidation and the studies are limited to preliminary lab scale only and there exists no commercial technology. This proposed project is aimed to design, develop, and evaluate an optimal process and catalyst that results in improved bioethanol conversion and acetonitrile yields with improved catalytic activity. Further, it is proposed to carryout kinetic studies followed by reactor design and scale-up. An intensified artificial intelligence (AI) driven experimental approach is adopted for designing and optimizing the overall process and catalyst, which leads to an efficient solution with minimum utilization of effort, time and resources. This approach leads to efficient design of catalyst with improved properties such as active surface area, well dispersed active sites, thermal stability, acidity/basicity of catalyst. AI/ML based predictive models will be developed and used in the inverse design of catalyst, in which genetic algorithms will be employed to search in the space of catalyst, promoter, support with the objective of maximizing ethanol conversion and achieving maximum product yield. The GA resulted potential lead catalyst candidates will be synthesized by adopting suitable preparation methods and detailed catalyst characterisation studies will be performed. Further, it is proposed to carryout process optimization and kinetic studies in a fixed bed reactor to experimentally evaluate the kinetic parameters, such as reaction rate, rate constant, and activation energy that are useful for scale up studies. Finally, it is proposed to demonstrate the vapor phase catalytic ammoxidation process for production of acetonitrile from diluted bioethanol (40-60%) with conversion ~90% and selectivity greater than 98%. The outcome of the proposed project is the process technology at TRL 5/6, which can be readily transferred to the industry.