The Rowan University Department of Chemical Engineering has received an NSF-CCLIgrant to develop realistic chemical reaction engineering experiments for theundergraduate curriculum. Two of these experiments were an esterification reactioncarried out in a packed bed, and a competitive reaction in which the kinetics wereinfluenced by micromixing.The first experiment is the esterification of ethanol and acetic acid to form ethyl acetate.The reaction is carried out in a fixed-bed reactor with Purolite resin 269 acting as acatalyst. Students first examine this esterification reaction in their organic chemistryclass, and the focus is on the esterification reaction mechanism. The packed bedexperiment developed in this project re-examines this reaction from a chemicalengineering perspective. For example, the reaction is reversible and equilibrium-limited,but in the organic chemistry lab, there is no examination of the kinetics. Thecomplementary chemical engineering experiment examines the relationship betweenresidence time and conversion.The second experiment is a competitive system involving these two reactions:
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