Microwave-assisted preparation of polyphosphoric acid in a continuous-flow reactor

Polyphosphoric acid (PPA) is widely used in inorganic salt production, petrochemical industry, electronic material preparation and other manufacturing industries. Conventional preparation methods of PPA has disadvantages of pollution, high energy consumption and long production time. To address this problem, microwave continuous-flow preparation may be a desirable way due to its advantages of environmentally-friendly, rapidity and high efficiency. Therefore, to explore the process of preparing PPA by microwave continuous-flow method, a continuous-flow microwave reactor was designed for the dehydration process of orthophosphoric acid to prepare PPA in this paper. The microwave-assisted dehydration process was studied in comparison with the conventional dehydration process and the “closed” microwave-assisted dehydration process in terms of energy efficiency, process times and treatment capacity. The effect of input microwave power, reduced pressure and inlet flow velocity of orthophosphoric acid on the performance of the dehydration process was studied. The results showed that the influence of the microwave power on the temperature rise process during dehydration is greater than that of the reduced pressure. Moreover, the inlet flow rate has a great impact on the treatment capacity and product quality of the dehydration process. Bedsides, the comparison with the other two methods showed that microwave heating can effectively shorten the dehydration time, and the continuous-flow treatment can effectively improve the treatment capacity of microwave heating. The perspectives of the process scale-up by continuous-flow microwave heating method is also discussed.