Polypropylene By a Vertical Stirred-Bed Process (BASF Technology)

With the constant growth in applications for polypropylene, the industry is becoming more cost effective in its production. In this review, we focus our study on the production of polypropylene homopolymer and copolymer using vertical stirred-bed gas phase technology (BASF). Reactor productivity has increased significantly (by catalyst improvements, etc.), and it is now possible to produce greater than 220 million lb/yr (100,000 t/yr) of polypropylene (homopolymer) in a single train (50 m³ reactor). A wide range of propylene homo polymers, random copolymers, and impact copolymers can be produced using this process scheme.

In this review we evaluate the economics for production of polypropylene for two cases: polypropylene homopolymer and polypropylene block copolymer.