Phenol

production
‫ﻣﺤﻤﺪ ﻣﻜﺎرم‬

Introduction :
The sulphonation process was first used by the German chemical company BASF in 1899.
The process consisted of first reacting benzene with sulphonic acid at around 150-170
degrees which would produce benzene sulponic acid. From this the product is neutralized
using sodium sulphate and then fused with sodium hydroxide. This leaves us with sodium
phenoxide. This sodium penoxide is reacted again with sulphuric acid and we will be left
with crude phenol and sodium sulphate.Once we have obtained the crude phenol and
separated it from the sodium sulphate we must use distillation towers to purify our phenol to
achieve the cleanest product. You can achieve a percentage yield of around 80-90%, with
research showing on average it is close to 88%
This process was used right up to the 1960s, but it had one major flaw and that was the poor
atom economy. The atom economy is the ratio of the molecular mass of the reactant to the
molecular mass of the product. The research showed that on average the process had an
atom economy of around 32.3%-36.7% which means around one third of the reactant mass
left the process as the desired product phenol. The amount of waste that this processed
produced was a major reason why it is no longer used in the industrial world today.
Fig. 1 flow sheet of phenol production process

Reference :
Production of phenol via sulphonation of benzene​.
● Process, P. (2018) Phenol Production By Benzene Sulfonation Process [online],
Enggyd.blogspot.com, available:
http://enggyd.blogspot.com/2010/09/phenol-production-by-benzene.html [accessed
26 Sep 2018].
● Panov, G. (2010) “ChemInform Abstract: Advances in Oxidation Catalysis: Oxidation
of Benzene to Phenol by Nitrous Oxide”, ChemInform, 32(26), no-no.