| Summary: | The epoxidation of soybean oil is industrially carried out by using peroxyacid generated in situ by reacting concentrated hydrogen peroxide with acetic or formic acid, in the presence of a mineral acid as a catalyst. The reaction is generally highly exothermic and an excessive increase of temperature is proved to occur, with clear safety issue.
This unwanted phenomena is typically prevented by limiting the peroxyacid reactant amount with respect to the stoichiometry, either in semi-continuous fed-batch or in pulse-fed-batch.
In this paper, starting from experiments and given kinetic data, the set of reactions have been analysed in the light of safety, by means of classical runaway criteria.
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