Abstract：In order to explore the effect of reaction conditions to the synthesis of polyoxymethylene dimethyl ethers (PODE) from methylal and trioxymethylene, the reaction performance and rate were investigated in a stainless steel tube fixed-bed reactor, using the strong acid cation exchange resin modified by p-toluenesulfonic acid as the catalyst. The results indicated that the conversion of trioxymethylene was over 90% with this composite catalyst. The reaction kinetics of power function type was established according to the mechanism of consecutive reactions and the kinetic parameters were estimated by Particle Swarm Optimization. The model results calculated with four orders Runge Kutta method can describe well the reaction conversion and the product distribution obtained experimentally, which shows that the kinetic model is feasible. This work can provide the fundamental data for the reactor simulation and scale-up.
