Fine chemical production Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Fine chemical production - Essay Example Chemically, citral consists of a mixture of a pair of aldehydes (terpenoids) having similar molecular formula but different structures. The two compounds are considered to be double bond isomers with the E-isomer being referred to as citral â€Å"a† or geranial while Z-isomer is known as citral â€Å"b† or neral. Although citral naturally occurs in compounds such as lemon grass and can be isolated from these citral containing oils, it is only available in sizable quantities. For effective synthetic manufacture of citral on a large scale basis for industrial purposes, it is increasingly becoming important to have a synthetic method of fine production from simple, inexpensive but readily available commercial chemicals such as isoprene and bata-pinene among others. Citral is widely used in the manufacture of perfumes, lotions, creams, shampoos and flavourings. In addition, the chemical compound is also an important basis for synthesizing a variety of popular fragrance compounds such as geraniol, eugenal, ionones and citronellol as well as in making carotinoids used for both vitamin A and E. Being one of the most important acyclic monoterpenes due to its numerous industrial applications, citral has many synthetic routes some of which are currently being used in commercial production of the chemical. This paper presents a fine chemical production of Citral including its chemistry, synthetic route selection, thermodynamics, kinetics and wastes issues. The current selected synthetic route for the production of citral involves the use of isobutene and formaldehyde as the primary feeding stocks with nitric acid as the preferred choice of catalysts. Using this method, citral can effectively be produced by from the reaction between isobutene and formaldehyde molecules under high temperatures and pressure and using a catalyst. The resultant chemical is then subjected to numerous special