Process hazard evaluation for the epoxidation of soybean oil with calorimetry techniques

Abstract Epoxidized soybean oil was widely used in industrial production. However, the epoxidized soybean oil production process releases a lot of heat, which could cause a runaway reaction, resulting in fires and explosions. Therefore, the thermal risk of the soybean oil epoxidation reaction process has been studied. Differential scanning calorimetry was used to investigate the thermal stability of reaction materials. The parameters such as initial exothermic temperature and reaction heat were obtained based on heat flow diagrams. EasyMax was used to analyze the soybean oil epoxidation reaction under different reaction temperatures and dosing rate conditions. The maximum temperature of the synthesis reactions, time to maximum rate under adiabatic condition (), and adiabatic temperature rise () were obtained by analyzing the epoxidation reaction. An adiabatic accelerating calorimeter was used to study the adiabatic decomposition of reaction products to obtain safety criteria such as adiabatic temperature rise and maximum reaction rate. The results obtained by the risk matrix evaluation method show that the risk level of the soybean oil epoxidation process was unacceptable. According to the results of the runaway scenario analysis method, the risk level of soybean oil epoxidation reaction was level 5. Therefore, the reaction process needs to be improved to ensure safe production.