Study On Catalytic Hydrogenation Of Ethyl Acetate To Ethanol

Commonly named alcohol, ethanol is a flammable, colorless transparent liquid volatile at room temperature under atmospheric pressure. Its water solution has special, pleasant fragrance, and slightly irritating. Ethanol has a wide range of uses, especially as a new clean fuel, ethanol gasoline is currently the world’s focus on renewable energy development. Industries produce ethanol by using fermentation method, ethylene hydration method and technology of coal chemical industry. The technology of coal chemical industry is most consistent with China’s national conditions. Acetic acid is an important chemical raw material, which is mainly used for the production of acetate, vinyl acetate, PTA etc. With the rapid development of acetic acid industry, acetic acid has become an important coal chemical product in China with production overcapacity and price slumped. In the background that the development of fermentation method ethanol has been stopped, the huge potential consumer demand of China’s fuel ethanol and limited supply capacity of ethanol brought good market opportunities for acetic acid hydrogenation to ethanol.1.3tons of acetic acid can produce1tons of ethanol in the theory. In recent years, acetic acid market price is3000yuan per ton, while ethanol is about7000yuan per ton. It will make a lot of profit. Estimated cost of catalyst and hydrogen, ethanol selectivity and separation and purification of energy consumption will be decided in the very great degree from acetic acid to ethanol processing cost. Acetate hydrogenation to ethanol reaction and separation are simple. The catalyst is copper matrix composite catalyst conventional. It cost less. At the same time, because of the weak corrosion of the raw material and the products, we can use carbon-steel material. The amount of investment is greatly reduced. In addition, the esterification technology of acetic acid industry is now quite mature in China. Against this background, the present study is focused on the exploration of new copper-based catalysts capable of efficient ethyl acetate hydrogenation to furnish ethanol.Copper base catalyst is the most suitable for hydrogenation of esters because of cheap price, simple preparation process, more activity and stability. In this paper, the ethyl acetate hydrogenation to ethanol reaction process by screening parameters on the catalyst, preparation method, the active component content, calcination temperature:using copper nitrate as copper source, ZrO2as support, oxalate coprecipitation method as preparation method, calcination temperature under500℃and Cu loading is30wt%.Furthermore, the process optimization in the ethyl acetate hydrogenation to ethanol reaction over Cu/ZrO2catalysts has been studied, the effects of the reaction conditions including solvent, molar ratio of hydrogen, H2pressure, reaction time and temperature were tested. The results showed that the best reaction conditions are240℃,3.0Mpa H2pressure,80:1molar ratio of hydrogen,0.15h-1space velocity and solvent ethanol. It was also established that the overall performance can be further improved by adding Zn as additives. Effective catalysts is Cu/ZnO/ZrO2catalysts (Cu loading is30wt%, Zr:Zn=2:1).Finally, in order to explore the industry application of the Cu/ZnO/ZrO2catalysts, in this paper the addition of graphite and catalyst life of Cu/ZnO/ZrO2catalysts have been studied and discussed.Meanwhile, the effect of the catalyst morphology, active component and loading on the activity of our catalyst have been investigated from the characterization of XRD. TEM. BET, TPR and TPD. We got that high dispersion and small particle size of active component will be benefit to the reaction activity. Vector ZrO2and the active center of Cu had certain interaction in catalytic hydrogenation, and when the vector ZrO2was tetragonal shows best.