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

Publication history: Received December 22, 2004
Accepted February 14, 2005

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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Simulation Studies on Reactive Distillation for Synthesis of tert-Amyl Ethyl Ether

Ukrit Sahapatsombud Amornchai Arpornwichanop¹ Suttichai Assabumrungrat^† Piyasan Praserthdam Shigeo Goto²

Center of Excellence in 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, May 2005, 22(3), 387-392(6), 10.1007/BF02719416

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Abstract

In this work, a reactive distillation column in which chemical reactions and separations occur simultaneously is applied for the synthesis of tert-amyl ethyl ether (TAEE) from ethanol (EtOH) and tert-amyl alcohol (TAA). A rate-based kinetic model for liquid-phase etherification and an equilibrium stage model for separation are employed to study the reactive distillation. The calculation is carried out using the commercial software package, Aspen Plus. Simulations are performed to examine the effects of design variables, i.e., a number of rectifying, reaction and stripping stages on the performance of reactive distillation column. It has been found that an optimal column configuration for the TAEE production under the study is designed with no rectifying, 4 reaction and 8 stripping stages. With such an appropriate specification of the reactive distillation column, the effects of various operating variables on the TAA conversion and TAEE selectivity are further investigated and the results have shown that the reflux ratio and operating pressure are the most important factors to the operation of the reactive distillation.

Keywords

tert-Amyl Ethyl Ether Reactive Distillation Simulation

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