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Conflict of Interest: In relation to this article, we declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Publication history: Received June 22, 2004
Accepted October 11, 2004

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Production of Ethyl tert-Butyl Ether from tert-Butyl Alcohol and Ethanol Catalyzed by β-Zeolite in Reactive Distillation

Suttichai Assabumrungrat^† Darin Wongwattanasate Varong Pavarajarn Piyasan Praserthdam Amornchai Arpornwichanop¹ Shigeo Goto²

Center of Excellence on Catalysis and Catalytic Reaction Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand ¹Control and Systems Engineering,Department of Chemical Engineering,Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand ²Department of Chemical Engineering, Nagoya University, Chikusa, Nagoya 464-8603, Japan

Suttichai.A@eng.chula.ac.th

Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering, November 2004, 21(6), 1139-1146(8), 10.1007/BF02719485

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Abstract

The synthesis of ethyl tert-butyl ether (ETBE) from a liquid phase reaction between tert-butyl alcohol (TBA) and ethanol (EtOH) in reactive distillation has been studied. β-Zeolite catalysts with three compositions (Si/Al ratio=13, 36 and 55) were compared by testing the reaction in a semi-batch reactor. Although they showed almost the same performance, the one with Si/Al ratio of 55 was selected for the kinetic and reactive distillation studies because it is commercially available and present in a ready-to-use form. The kinetic parameters of the reaction determined by fitting parameters with the experimental results at temperature in the range of 343-363 K were used in an ASPEN PLUS simulator. Experimental results of the reactive distillation at a standard condition were used to validate a rigorous reactive distillation model of the ASPEN PLUS used in a simulation study. The effects of various operating parameters such as condenser temperature, feed molar flow rate, reflux ratio, heat duty and mole ratio of H₂O : EtOH on the reactive distillation performance were then investigated via simulation using the ASPEN PLUS program. The results were compared between two reactive distillation columns: one packed with β-zeolite and the other with conventional Amberlyst-15. It was found that the effect of various operating parameters for both types of catalysts follows the same trend; however, the column packed with β-zeolite outperforms that with Amberlyst-15 catalyst due to the higher selectivity of the catalyst.

Keywords

Reactive Distillation ETBE Synthesis β-Zeolite ASPEN PLUS

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