The Dehydration Of 2, 3-Butanediol Into Methyl Ethyl Ketone

Methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) is an excellent organic solvent which is widely used in many field, and it's one of the most important ketone solvents. There are more than ten production methods of MEK. But the industrial methods mainly use petrochemical resources as raw materials, there are many problems such as raw material non-renewable, production process and purification process complex, high prodution cost, big amount of energy consumption, and serious environment pollution, etc. In this condition, it's necessary to do some research on the methods to prepare MEK using the renewable raw material instead of petrochemical resources.A new process to prepare MEK with the dehydration of 2,3-butanediol as raw material, which is produced by biological fermentation, has been studied in this paper, by which we can effecticely overcome the disadvantages by normal methods. The dehydration of 2,3-butanediol into MEK can be accomplished both in liquid phase and gas-solid phase. The dehydration of 2,3-butanediol into MEK with the use of sulfuric acid, p-toluene sulphonic acid, ZSM-5 molecular sieve and the solid-acid catalyst homemade as catalyst was studied in this paper, and the yield of MEK was 78.9% in the optimal experiment. The dehydration of 2,3-butanediol into MEK in gas-solid phase with the use of solid-acid catalyst and the refined solid-acid catalyst as catalyst was also studied in this paper, the experiments were optimized by the orthogonal experiments, and the conversion of 2,3-butanediol was 99.3%, the yield of MEK was 72.65%, the selectivity of MEK was 73.16% in the optimal experiment.