Simulation Studies of Reactive Distillation Processes for Synthesis of Ethyl Acetate

摘要

Ethyl acetate (EtAc) is mainly used as solvent in paints and coatings industry, inks production and as industrial solvent in many other branches of industry. Esterification of acetic acid with ethanol may be performed to synthesize ethyl acetate. In this paper, a reactive distillation (RD) column with packing cation exchange resins as a catalyst is applied. Mathematical models of reactive distillation are based on the conventional distillation process with supplementary equations added to model the reactions present. Column simulations performed here using Aspen Plus show excellent agreement with experimental data for the EtAc system. A sensitive analysis was performed to determine the effects of key design and operating variables on column performance and, subsequently, an optimal column configuration was obtained.