The Novel Study Of Reactive Distillation For Synthesizing Ethyl Acetate

Ethyl Acetate(EtAc) is one kind of important chemical organic materials, with more and more increasing industrial demand. Nowadays, one of the synthesis processes is via esterification of ethanol(EtOH) and acetic acid(HAc), especially regions abundant in ethanol deposits. Application of reactive distillation method to improve EtAc product composition has been the popular study in the past years. The paper studies heterogeneous reactive distillation column and improved heterogeneous reactive distillation process. And. the paper compares the results between reactive divided wall column(RDWC) process and improved process.Physical property of reactive system was discussed due to importance of property parameters, on the basis of binary systems with suitable vapor-liquid and liquid-liquid equilibrium data, a reasonable NRTL model parameter set for calculating liquid activity coefficients has been established by regression system of the commercial simulation software Aspen Plus(?). Hayden-O'Connell equation of state was introduced to calculate vapor phase thermodynamic properties due to consideration of vapor association of acetic acid.In order to obtain optimized operating parameters after primary simulation study, optimization analysis on model parameters of reactive distillation was done, with the effect of theory stage number, feed position, reactive region position, reflux ratio, catalyst quantity and feed mole ratio on EtAc product composition. The improved heterogeneous reactive distillation process was validated, and the result indicated its validity.The research compared the results of reactive divided wall column process and improved process, including the liquid phase mole fraction in the two columns and the temperature profiles in the two columns. And the research made optimization analysis on the flow distribution ratio in the RDWC, feed mole ratio, and the effect of side-draw flow position on EtAc product composition and reboiler duty, for obtaining optimized operating parameters of heterogeneous reactive distillation process. Under the same condition of EtAc product composition and operation condition in the RDWC, the reboiler reduced energy by 20.7%.