Boreskov Institute of Catalysis of the Siberian Branch of Russian ...

OP-III-12products are vaporized and thus, by evaporating a part of reaction mixture is separated fromthe catalyst. Therefore much higher conversion of esterification can be achieved, compared tochemical equilibrium conversion. At temperatures above 100 °C, the EtOH conversion >90 %was reached, see Figure 2. Similar reactor performance was already reported for carrying outesterification of acetic acid by butanol in trickle-bed reactor 3 . Such process can beadvantageously used for simple and very cheap overcoming of chemical equilibriumlimitation of studied reaction system.3.2 Reactive distillation columnA series of reactive distillation experiments were performed and the process parameterswere used as an input for process simulation. Achieved results show that in the organic phase,EtAc can be selectively separated from the organic distillate with purity higher than 92 wt. %.EtOH concentration in the product of only 2-3 % represents the additional separation effort tobe putted into the final purification of EtAc. Despite the problems with additional separation,a presence of EtOH is much less disadvantageous compared for presence of AA. The reboilerproduct is formed by almost pure AA, which after dehydration (e.g. by distillation or byadding defined amount of acetanhydride) can be recycled back to the pre-reactor. The detailsabout all achieved results and process simulation will be given in our full paper.4 References1. K. Sundmacher, A. Kienle, Reactive Distillation: Status and Future Dir., Wiley-VCH; (2002)2. Q. Smejkal, J. Kolena, J. Hanika, Chemical Engineering Science 56, Issue 2 ( 2001), 365-3703. J. Hanika, M. Kucharova, J. Kolena, Q.Smejkal, Catalysis today 79-80 (2003), 83-87114