In the chemical industry, the refining process of acrylic acid and its esters is core to ensuring product purity and improving production efficiency.This process features highly corrosive media, wide operating temperature fluctuations, strict continuous operation requirements and large-scale plant demands, imposing stringent standards on heat exchange equipment in reliability, corrosion resistance and heat transfer efficiency.

Process Difficulties of Acrylic Acid Refining Unit

Difficulty 1: Highly Corrosive Medium

The medium contains corrosive components such as acrylic acid monomers and organic acids, which easily cause corrosion and leakage of equipment made of conventional materials.

Difficulty 2: High Requirement for Continuous Operation

The process demands long-term stable operation of equipment, with high costs for shutdown and maintenance.

Difficulty 3: Critical Heat Transfer Efficiency

Heat transfer efficiency directly affects product purity and system energy consumption, requiring high-efficiency heat transfer within a limited space.

SHPHE Solution for Acrylic Acid Industry

SHPHE has developed large fully welded plate heat exchangers specifically for this application, with the following advantages:

Fully welded structural design：Adopting an integral welded sealing structure, it eliminates gasket aging issues and delivers high reliability, ensuring long-term stable operation of the equipment.

Structural Optimization：By optimizing the flow channel layout and adopting CFD simulation to improve flow conditions, turbulent flow is intensified to enhance heat transfer efficiency. The unique plate corrugation design provides excellent pressure resistance, deformation resistance, and impact resistance, greatly extending the equipment’s service life.

Material Adaptability： Corrosion-resistant materials such as austenitic stainless steel, duplex stainless steel, titanium and titanium alloys, and nickel and nickel alloys are available based on medium characteristics.

Typical References

SHPHE supplied large fully welded plate heat exchangers for a 160,000-ton/year integrated acrylic acid project of a major domestic chemical enterprise. The units replaced the original shell-and-tube equipment, with only 1/5 of the volume and 1/3 of the weight of shell-and-tube models, greatly cutting overall construction costs.This unit ranks as the largest acrylic acid overhead condenser currently in service in China.

Key Parameters

Single unit heat transfer area: 7300㎡

Maximum processing capacity: 4500m³/h

Heat load: 26000kW

Weight: 120t

Operation Performance：The purity of finished acrylic acid is steadily improved, and the component separation performance meets the premium product standards.Compared with conventional shell-and-tube overhead condensers, it reduces operating energy cost by 10% and cuts civil engineering and other related costs by over 20%.